DAVID LESTER ART

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

On tour, Mecca Normal stays in the homes of librarians, academics, scientists, artists and fans, and we frequently see Nikki McClure‘s calendars hanging in kitchens while up early to get back on the road, David and I try to figure out where the nice people still asleep upstairs hide their coffee beans. In this way, calendar page by calendar page, city by city, we know the scope of the community that Nikki infiltrates and conspires within.

There is the story of Nikki finding me on a pile of top soil in the middle of the night eating raw oysters out of the jar with my hands. Or the time she chased a possum around the house with a broom while David and I stood on chairs shrieking. Or how it was that her calendar on the wall of a Lower East Side apartment tipped me off to the possibility that perhaps I was not in my lover’s bachelor pad, but that a woman—his wife more than likely—had tapped the nail into the wall and hung Nikki’s calendar there.

Nikki McClure is an elegant communicator of vital information. Beyond that, she has the ability to both inspire and soothe—her work is a simultaneous call to take action and a call to save your strength. Her ideas and work occupy places of honor in museums, on the minds of activists, in books gripped by the hands of children and hanging on kitchen walls—in those annoying spaces between windows where you knew there was something missing.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Continued from May 14

Every day at the International Pop Underground convention, Anita saw Calvin and Candice of K Records talking to people who looked like they were in bands. She wanted to run up and hug them, thank them, tell them how much the IPU meant to her. How happy she was. But she couldn’t.

Anita loved Kicking Giant, and she thought it might be OK to try and say something to Tae when she saw him walking out of the Smithfield Café.

“I play bass if you ever need a bass player,” she said, and Tae laughed, in a nice way, and said they wouldn’t be needing a bass, which Anita, of course, already knew.

Tae said he appreciated her talking to him because he was from New York and didn’t know many people in town. He had a lovely round laugh, and he seemed genuinely happy that they’d met. Kicking Giant made Anita feel like she could do things differently, that she didn’t have to follow any rules.

“If you ever want to do a show in Ellensburg, I can set it up for you,” she said. “I can’t guarantee what the money would be like, but you can stay in my room and I’ll sleep on the couch. My parents won’t mind. I can make you both breakfast in the morning.”

Anita wrote down her address and asked Tae to send her a letter. Which he did, months later, saying what he’d been doing since the IPU.

In 1992, Anita moves to New York City. She joins a grunge band with three guys, one of whom is guitar player Joe Lancaster. They try to get spots opening for Sub Pop bands that come through. Riot grrrl is well underway when Anita and Carol go to see Kicking Giant play CB’s 313 Gallery. After the set, Anita goes over to Tae.

“I talked to you in Olympia, at the IPU,” she says. “Before the Bikini Kill show, outside the Smithfield.”

“Right,” says Tae. “You were going to put on a show for us, right?”

“Yes, I said you could stay at my parents. How embarrassing,” says Anita.

“It was very sweet.”

“I was such a geek back then,” Anita says.

“Oh well,” he says. “Maybe it’s not so bad being a geek.”

“You know, I moved to New York because of Kicking Giant and you’d moved to Olympia by the time I got here,” she tells Tae while he’s packing up his black and white Rickenbacker guitar.

Back at their table, Anita tells Carol, “I sort of wish he hadn’t remembered me. I was such a geek.”

“That was, like, last year, Anita,” says Carol. “He’s probably just saying he remembers you.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” says Anita.

“How do you know?” Carol asks, growing weary of Anita’s enthusiasm for all things lo-fi and uber sincere.

“He just wouldn’t. That’s not what they’re about.”

“OK, what are they about? Maybe you can explain it to me,” Carol says.

“Kicking Giant made it seem like anything was possible. Rachel standing there, feet shoulder width apart, pounding out these tribal beats and Tae on the edge of something excruciating, twisting and snapping his body around with that big guitar feeding back mercilessly. I couldn’t believe they were from New York. These two people saying, ‘We’re a band and these are our songs.’ No apology, no context. None that I knew of, anyway. They took themselves seriously. It gave me hope about living here. About trying to play music.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

You arrive at the Media Club in Vancouver on a warm spring evening. The Corin Tucker Band is soundchecking. One by one, band members notice you sitting along the side wall. They smile and wave at you from the stage. You wave back, happy to see them. Your soundcheck is good. You go home to get changed. While you are sitting on the floor in the middle of your room, tying pairs of dollar store shoelaces together to make them long enough for a pair of boots you want to wear to the show, you think about being alone. You like to be alone. You wouldn’t want anyone else to be here right now. The TV in the bedroom tells you that bin Laden is dead. Strange, in a totally self-referential way, that you and Corin Tucker Band drummer Sara Lund were just talking about a tour you did together during 9/11 when she was in Unwound.

You tell Sara that, after playing at Maxwell’s, you walked to the Hudson River in the pouring rain to see the glowing vapors rising off the south end of Manhattan. Ground Zero. You tell Sara about listening to Thrones that night. Music never felt this way to you before. You experience something entirely new. Sound feels good. Tones stabilize your jittery nervous system.

The laces on your boots are too long, but you don’t really care. You go to the show. The show is good. People laugh at your jokes. You like that. You make a video during the Corin Tucker Band’s encore. Corin sings while Seth plays keys. You put this on the Internet the next day before you head off to play Bellingham at the Shakedown, an excellent new club with very friendly staff and an attentive soundperson. You are not hungry when you get to soundcheck, but you look at the menu. Deep-fried peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. You wonder if they could do that on whole wheat. The show is good. You are in the balcony when Corin asks you to join them on stage for “1000 Years.” You run downstairs, push through the crowd to do the song, and then conveniently, when you step back into the audience, you are right at the front. You take some photos that won’t turn out, and then the band launches into a riff you know. Solid bass, a catchy melody from long ago. ”We’re equal, but different, we’re equal, but different, we’re equal, but different.” Au Pairs. You love this band, this album, this song. You look across the room at your guitar player leaning against the wall. You are smiling and dancing. He sees you and smiles back. He gave you this album nearly 30 years ago. He gave you a lot of great albums. “It’s obvious, so obvious,” Corin sings, beautifully. This, and X-Ray Spex were your favorites. You drove your 1974 Toyota Corolla to the warehouse district and sang along to “Warrior In Woolworths” on a cassette tape. You recorded yourself. You don’t know that the band you just started will last at least 27 years. You don’t have a name for the band yet. You have not written your first song, but you love to sing. You are self-conscious even though no one can hear you. You sing loud, but not loud enough or strong enough, and you are irritated with yourself. Poly Styrene is so good. You want to be that good. You swear at the end of the song.

You have an appointment at 8 a.m. at the hospital. You are having a mammogram and an ultrasound. You are genetically pre-disposed to breast cancer. It’s 7 a.m. You must get ready and go. You are 51. You live in Canada. The cost of these tests is covered. You wonder about women in the U.S., where health care is regarded as a commodity to be sold. You want women—musicians, writers, artists and activists, women you’ve met along the way—to have mammograms. You still have the tape. Thirty years later, you listen to yourself swearing after singing along with Poly. You rush to write about it, but you are crying as you type. Poly died last week. An advanced form of breast cancer (in the U.K., where they have nationally socialized health care). She was 53. You have to catch the bus. You have to get to your appointment. You have more goddamned songs to swear at the end of. ”It’s obvious, so obvious.”

Economics 101. National health insurance programs work. Canada spends 10 percent of its gross domestic product on universal health care. In the U.S.—where thousands of lawyers are being paid to deny care—16 percent of the gross domestic product is spent on health care. This is attributed to multi-level administration costs and because a single-payer system can negotiate much lower prices.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

David Lester’s graphic novel The Listener arrived from the printer this week. Beautiful, heavy and shiny, like all great works of art should be. In June, we’ll launch the book in Canada. In Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. I’m creating an adaptation of David’s book, which includes a Mecca Normal performance. Several characters will come off the powerpoint page to discuss the story, and David, playing the part of the author, will interrupt to interject history. In Mecca Normal, I am story and David, on guitar, is history. Story and history run concurrently in music, which, like history, repeats itself.

As Dave and I rehearsed the adaptation for the launch event, I started thinking about finishing the video for Mecca Normal’s song “Malachi.” It came out as a seven-inch single on K Records in November 2010, and I hadn’t figured out how to complete the video. The song is about an activist who lit himself on fire to protest war. His action went largely unnoticed due to extenuating circumstances. I wrote the lyrics before I realized that a song about his action might increase opposition to war, which was, I believe, part of his intention.

It wasn’t until I was watching the video for the third or fourth time that I made a connection between “Malachi” and The Listener, the part where the old people express regret. They were complacent at a significant juncture in history, and Hitler was able to rise to power.

In the first run-through of the adaptation for The Listener, I told a story about being on tour with the Indigo Girls, when Jane Siberry and I worked out this weird little skit where it appeared as though I smashed her head into her keyboards while she was playing a song. The purpose of the Siberry story within The Listener event is to demonstrate that we don’t know how art or actions will be regarded. Art, in my opinion, should abstract and obscure the realities that we can otherwise simply experience.

To take the point of the Siberry story further, I piled a lot of David’s MAGNET illustrations into the linearity of the video-making program and immediately noticed that my brain (“the brain”) very much wanted to connect the images to the story being told. I found the results to be quite interesting. I used David’s art for my own purpose, beyond his intention, and created something else. It could just as well be otherwise.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

“I don’t care if you’re the sort of feminist who doesn’t like to be picked up,” Ryan says as he carries me to the bedroom. I close my eyes. Dizzy. Ryan puts me on the bed and starts undoing the little buttons on my top. I had other plans for the buttons and how to proceed. Tempting, teasing, talking. I want to say, “Wait.” I say nothing. He tugs off my pants and my panties in one go. I’ll just let it happen. Without me.

After Ryan cums, he says, “I’ve decided to prepare you for your next lover.” As with other men I’ve been with recently, my orgasm—my lack of orgasm—isn’t acknowledged.

I get up, saying, “I’ve never had a lover prepare me for my next lover.”

“No?”

I scoop up my clothes and get dressed in the mildewy bathroom.

Ryan is in the living room looking at a book on building houses with bags of dirt. I stand next to him. He shows me photos of people filling the bags and moving them into position. He flips the pages, back to front, and the dirt bag houses appear to unbuild themselves.

I prepare to leave. Ryan opens the back door into the blackness of the alley and says, “I hope you don’t have far to walk.”

“I think I’ll catch the bus,” I say, motioning toward the deserted bus stop 20 feet away.

“Goodbye,” Ryan says and closes the door. Nice.

Young drunk guys in over-sized pants sit near me at the back of the bus, stinking of booze, speaking maybe Greek. I look out the window—holes of light in the blackness whiz by. Everyone gets off the bus before I do.

Putting my hair up, getting ready to take a shower, I think about Steve. The night he said I was sexy and beautiful. I recall sleeping well; it was the only time he stayed over night. He was unable to achieve an erection. In the morning, he asked if he’d snored, and I told him it sounded more like a wolverine devouring gerbils. We both laughed.

Steve sat on the edge of the bed, watching me pin my hair up, getting ready to take a shower. I was happy to close the bathroom door on my inability to arouse him. I rubbed Ivory soap on a thick orange washcloth and dreaded turning off the stream of hot water.

Steve was at the stove, making the tea, when I stepped quickly from the bathroom to my bedroom to look for something to wear. I was holding up a gunmetal gray jumpsuit when he appeared in the doorway shaking his head.

“Don’t wear that, Celia,” he said flatly.

I stuffed the jumpsuit back in the closet, and he came up behind me.

“When I saw that photo of you on Lavalife, before we met, I wanted to cum on your face.”

“Which photo?” I asked. I wanted to push him away, to get dressed, to have tea, to leave here, to be outside.

“The one where you have your hair up,” he said. “Like it is now.” His hands slid up and down my arms as I tried to put on my bra. He took the bra, dropped it on the floor and pulled me to the bed. I sat down awkwardly, naked. He propped me up on pillows against the headboard and unzipped his pants. He took out his penis and started stroking it. Leaning in close, he supported himself on the headboard with his other hand. Acrid sweat. His pudgy, semi-erect cock near my face.

The photo—an intense, unsmiling woman in a bathing-suit top, defined abs above the top of her short skirt, looking directly at the camera, showing her body to men. To him. The woman in the photo—taunting, teasing, asking for it—from the pages of Lavalife, Playboy, Hustler, a 1950s Sears catalog. Steve wants to cum on that face. In the photo. Jerking off, looking at the photo. My photo. Me.

The penis. The hand working it. His brain a private laboratory for reconstituting images and associations. I am stimuli—simulacrum—waiting, thinking. Alone. Observing the penis perform its penultimate biological function. Steve is imposing himself on my physicality, my identity, conjuring his idiosyncratic mélange. It is taking him a long time. The expression on my face probably isn’t helping. His hand moves faster. The headboard creaks. His penis is a blur of smooth flesh waggling around—knuckles in my face. I close my eyes. He ejaculates on my hair. Grunting, he lowers himself stiffly onto the bed and starts laughing. Laughing turns to coughing, and he rolls on his side, away from me.

“What?” I ask.

“I missed,” he says.

“I noticed,” I say, standing up, heading for the bathroom. I do not look in the mirror before stepping back into the shower.

***

A crow is growling on the sundeck, trying to push around the beach rocks I collected last summer. This crow has been here before with these antics. Why do crows always seem male? Another crow joins the first—smaller, blacker, shinier—it squawks, red throat. It might be the mother, berating the male who doesn’t seem to notice he is an adult now.

On TV, a documentary about World War II. Men wrote home to women waiting. One man’s elegant hand on paper wrote, “What I miss most is talking with you about the beauty of everything.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Interview with David Lester in With Arms Outstretched Arms zine (Leeds, U.K., 2007)
“I have always loved posters, and I have always had a strong interest in political history. Many people I have admired are quite obscure. Not because they are unimportant, but because they are somewhat lost to history. My hope is that we can learn from history and be inspired by it. But as we can see, even in love relationships, we often make the same mistakes over and over again.

“The key to my poster series is not that these are heroes, but that they are real, flawed people who stood up at a moment in history and took action. I purposely choose a politically diverse selection of individuals because I think that social change can come from individuals you may not agree with on many other issues including their personal lives. Social change can be messy.

“People in my poster series include John Heartfield, one of the creators of photomontage. He is an inspiration because he successfully combined art and politics at a time of great danger to himself during Hitler’s rise to power. American Paul Robeson campaigned against lynching. Imagine living in a time when lynching was actively occurring and the general public took little notice. You have to act. Robseon did, amid great personal sacrifice. Or the obscure American Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, who became an activist for farm workers rights when she was 42.

“When we create our own art, when we engage in activism, it can all seem hopeless and obscure. But that is all the more reason to act. The people I’ve documented faced down that political loneliness. They didn’t know they would succeed (and some didn’t), but their desire for a just world propelled them on.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Frank, a well-respected carpenter—a Broadway star in his own right—had a skill that he turned into real money. He built the sets that the rest of them frolicked on. For Carol, Frank was a relief after the succession of flakes and fools she’d dated. Frank took her to his favorite restaurants—Indian, Ethiopian, French, Spanish—and on weekends, they did things that Carol had planned to do as soon as she moved to New York, but never gotten around to. They went to museums and gardens, the Cloisters, bookstores and jazz clubs, and Frank told her amazing stories that captured her imagination in a way that it had not been captured before.

“There was a guy who used to run a dry cleaner in Greenwich Village,” said Frank. “He came to a restaurant I used to go to, a pizza place really, although I never had the pizza because they burned the crusts and I just don’t think pizza is the thing to have in a restaurant. If I’m going to have pizza, it’s because I’m extremely hungry and pressed for time. Not in a restaurant, no never. Not me.”

Carol laughed at Frank’s strange idea about restaurants and his theory about pizza: when and where it should be consumed. He amused her with his funny stories, and he seemed to enjoy her reaction. And she never questioned him as to whether the things he said were true. There was usually someone doing something absurd, and Frank tended to place the people in a reality they shared—some place in New York that they’d visited together, possibly even that same day—making them believable, in a sleight-of-hand kind of way.

A guy who runs a dry cleaner in Greenwich Village—what’s not to believe? Often times the story didn’t get beyond the character and the setting, before Frank was using what he’d just created as a platform to give his opinion—something that had been bothering him, like the burnt crust of a pizza in a restaurant. How can one mention the crust of another man’s pizza as a significant problem without a construction of some sort to hang it on?

Frank felt compelled to invent just exactly enough of a story to exhibit his assertions, complaints and observations. His creations were like hands on clay as he told Carol, watching her beautifully responsive face; he could increase a certain type of pressure and the clay would rise skyward allowing him to make the contraption tower into a vase or, conversely, if a story faltered, it would end up pressed down into a saucer or a plate.

The truth seemed to be a separate thing to the grandeur of the telling, and since the stories were about people she didn’t know or had never heard of, it didn’t really matter about their truthiness. They were just stories, and Frank seemed to need to tell them. That was the reason for the thing—fun and enjoyment—not in trying to sort out whether these things, the things he talked about, were true. She thought of Frank as a writer without paper, a painter lacking canvas. He needed to make up stories, and it was harmless enough that he told them to her.

Carol was aware that she modified her reactions to the stories based on his expressions, his appreciation of her as the audience, the listener—and, in a way, the subject, too—because while she was busily modifying her reactions to meet his expectations and requirements, he was doing the same thing. Frank was finding out what she liked and bringing those features out—adapting—to create what he thought would please her. All of this was an unarticulated collaboration, and if they’d thought to examine what they were engaged in—accomplishing, honing, inventing—they might have been surprised to see how well they operated together as a team. They might have found a more tactile way to proceed, making something that they could turn in their hands, to assess together, then move on from—that much the wiser. A product of some sort; something to release, promote or manufacture. Neither of them thought in these ways, and so their abilities went entirely unnoticed, especially by them.

If Frank started a story about a princess and he was describing her as rosy cheeked and raven haired, he’d see how that registered across the table in whichever quiet café they were sitting in after visiting a museum or before a night of jazz somewhere mysterious that Frank had found, that he couldn’t wait to show her. If he saw a hint of displeasure that the evening’s protagonist was going to have dark hair, he’d somehow slip that princess out the picture, so fast it would make anyone’s head spin, if they’d been paying attention—and Carol was, and she laughed to prove it.

The raven-haired beauty might suddenly slide from the back of her rearing steed, to be found next morning, drowned, face down in the moat. Carol laughed, and in the blink of an eye, the new princess would be fair and delicate with a crown of golden hair, and Carol would give off favorable signals with her eyes or her fingers, and the story would continue like so. Building. Being built. Together.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

On a Valentine’s Day long ago, I dressed up all sexy for the guy I was seeing. He refused to look at me. I made him dinner, and he didn’t say one word. We ate in total silence. His awkwardly averted eyes scoured the ceiling, the walls. He left, and I sat there crying, feeling like the biggest fucking idiot in the world. So much for trying to be sexy.

Of course it was different in the beginning, back before he needed to “prepare” before he got here, back when he raced over here without putting on his socks to get his hands on me. Somewhere along the way, there was a little transition. The wanting to get his hands on me as soon as he got in the door seemed different. He needed to “prepare” before he got here. I didn’t ask how, but when he arrived he was in a rush to jump into bed, me saying, “I wouldn’t mind talking for a few minutes, wouldn’t you like a coffee? And a little bit of foreplay wouldn’t go amiss.” But he was ready. Already ready. It felt like being with me any length of time was a big turn off. Any amount of time spent in my presence was going to diminish his interest. I was the thing that was destructive to his state of arousal. I pictured him sitting in his leaky car outside my apartment building flipping through the pages of girlie magazines. Preparing. OK. Ready. Going in. Get to the buzzer. Get upstairs. Yikes, there she is. Avert eyes. Think of the magazine, think of the girlies. Decline coffee. Move toward bedroom. Close eyes. Think of the girlies. Phew. Mission accomplished. And now for that coffee.

“Orange Sunset”
This sunset spreads orange
Across the sky
A lid pressing down
In Grand Central Station
Pickpockets look for tourist eyes
I am more obvious
White female
Ambassador of lust
He said,
“Come with me.
I know, you like to suck and fuck.”

I wrote this song after a two-month trip alone to India in 1985. I stopped in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on the way, thinking I’d take a boat to Madras, but there was a war, skirmishes off and on, and the boats between Sri Lanka and India were occasionally attacked, so I flew over to India. While in Sri Lanka, I stayed in an army barracks converted into a hostel, but because of the war, there was hardly anyone staying there. Somewhere, many corridors away, a guy coughing all night echoed through the nearly empty building. I was only there a day or so. I took a look around the city and was pestered by people wanting me to pay them for a tour. I actually didn’t have any Sri Lankan currency on me since I wasn’t planning on being there long, but this one guy was determined to show me a temple. I told him I had abso-fucking-lutely zero cash, but he wanted to take me there anyway. This wasn’t a calm, svengali, moustache-twisting, eyebrow-wriggling sort of proposal; this guy had bloody bandages on his feet, he was hobbling past things burning in the middle of the road, turning back to me, waving emphatically for me to follow him. And I did. There was an actual war going on, and for some stupid reason I’d flown to Colombo from Bangkok, lured by some cheap flight and a romantic notion of crossing the ocean in a fucking boat. I was 25 or so, but I still had another 15 years left of adolescent behavior in me. I kept wondering what the scam was, how was he going to get money out of me. At the temple he told me to take off my boots and leave them out-fucking-side, on the steps of the temple. On the street, basically. I was extremely reluctant to leave them there, and I probably shouldn’t have, but they were there when I returned, eyes adjusting to the overly bright sunlight after the dark of the temple, a small crowd standing around looking at the boots.

Someone in Colombo told me if I took the maximum allowable amount of cigarettes and booze to Madras, I could make a swell profit selling them to taxi drivers at the airport, so I bought a 26er of whiskey and a carton of Marlboros. The whiskey sold right away, but I guess the men of Madras weren’t Marlboro men. Now that I think about it, maybe the cowboy thing just didn’t connect with these skinny guys wearing lungis. I was stuck with this stupid carton of cigarettes strapped to the outside of my completely full packsack for three weeks, until someone finally wanted to buy them.

Back to the song. I was walking on a beautiful city beach in Colombo at sunset—families and couples strolling along—and this guy walked right up to me and said, “Come with me. I know you like to suck and fuck.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Continued from February 5

Dishes cleared, more wine poured, Joe starts in again.

“I don’t quite get being a sub and a feminist,” he says, addressing Ronnie respectfully. “You can’t be both.”

“I’m not a sub,” she replies, calmly. “I have a submissive nature that I decided to explore when I discovered it was beneficial to maintaining balance. There’s a theory that overly responsible and powerful individuals seek to give up control within limitations they set, knowing their boundaries will be respected and adhered to. It has a lot to do with trust. In fact, I’ve wondered if it has more to do with trust than power.”

“With me being a natural Dom,” Joe says, only getting this far before Anita interrupts him.

“Here with go with the natural-Dom portion of the program,” she says, feigning mock fatigue.

“If I told you to remove your bra,” Joe says to Ronnie. “Would you feel any inclination to do as you’re told?”

“Right now?” asks Ronnie.

“Yes,” replies Joe, his voice becoming colder.

Ronnie looks slowly around the table. From Joe to Carol to Frank, who lowers his chin, almost imperceptibly. Permission goes unnoticed by everyone except Ronnie, who slowly turns back to Joe. From Frank. To Carol. To Joe.

“Yes, I would,” she says, meeting Joe’s gaze.

Joe looks intently at Ronnie. She does not look away.

“If I was Catholic, I guess I’d cross myself right about now,” Anita says.

“I thought you were Catholic,” Carol says.

“Raised Catholic,” Anita says. “Gave the whole thing up for Lent when I moved to New York.”

“Shhhhhhhhh, I’m concentrating,” Joe says, without taking his eyes off Ronnie.

Carol and Anita make silly faces at each other across the table while Frank observes what is transpiring between Joe and Ronnie.

“Take your bra off.”

Ronnie sits completely still.

“Take your bra off,” Joe says again, same tone and volume.

Leaning forward slightly, her eyes on Joe, Ronnie slides both hands behind her back to unclasp the hooks. Her very full white breasts take on a slightly different shape once they’re released from the bra, which Ronnie drops beside her chair on the floor of the dining room.

Joe looks very pleased with himself, until he realizes there is pressure, unspoken as it is, to figure out what happens next. Ronnie is waiting, but he didn’t have any ideas beyond getting her to take her bra off. He wishes one of the others would say cut and it would all be over. Ronnie is staring at him, waiting.

“Frank,” Ronnie says, without taking her eyes off Joe. “Was the salad dressing store-bought or homemade?”

“I made it,” Frank replies, calmly. “Olive oil, balsamic vinegar with fresh oregano, parsley, cilantro and thyme from our herb garden. Freshly grated parmesan, sea salt and pepper. Freshly ground pepper.”

“Was it extra virgin olive oil, Frank?” Ronnie says, and they all crack up.

Ronnie bends sideways to pick up her bra, draping it and her blouse over her arm. She gets up and strides confidently to the washroom to get dressed.

“Lady has balls,” says Joe, with extreme relief. “I’ll give her that.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

“My dinner with thespians,” Frank says. “Always so interesting. Turning everything into something. Or nothing.”

“I love that film,” Carol says, changing the subject entirely.

“Which film?” Anita asks.

“My Dinner With Andre,” Carol says.

“I don’t know it,” Anita says.

“One of the perks of being with a mature man,” Carol says, sticking out her chin and giving Joe an overly dramatic glare.

“What’s it about?” Joe asks, taking the bait.

“It doesn’t really have an about, per se,” says Carol. “That I recall. I haven’t seen it for years. It was one of the films Frank and I went to when we were dating, but he’d seen it before. Andre Gregory’s character is having dinner with a man, and the two of them are in a restaurant, just talking. The strange thing is, when I think of the movie, I see what they were talking about in my mind’s eye. Even though I know that the entire film was just the two men having dinner.”

“What were they talking about?” asks Anita.

“I can’t remember, but I don’t think that was the point, really. The men hadn’t seen each other for a long time. One man told stories—he just talked—but when I think about the film, I see what he was talking about. A man in a forest and an enormous feast.”

“It’s the antithesis of Run Lola Run,” says Frank, a film he knows they’ve all seen. “Which, as I recall, had multiple visual versions of the same timeframe. Its linearity was expressed by the woman running, forward through time, but the way it was filmed and cut, inserted additional information.”

“I think you’re talking about Memento,” says Joe. “It cuts between one story line moving forward in time while another one tells the story backward, revealing more each time they switch.”

“Memento,” says Frank. “Maybe you’re right, Joe. Which is kind of what Carol is talking about with My Dinner With Andre, how she remembers it in her mind’s eye, the forest scene that never happened.”

“Now there’s a good trick for a low-budget film,” says Anita. “Have the characters talk about scenes that would otherwise require elaborate special effects.”

Carol gets up, taking empty wine bottles into the kitchen. Joe looks at Ronnie and says, “Boy, you sure don’t say much.”

“Leave the poor woman alone,” Anita says.

“Poor woman? I feel like she’s sitting here analyzing us,” Joe says.

“You might benefit from a little bit of analysis,” Carol says, as she returns with another bottle of wine.

“I haven’t seen any of the films,” Ronnie says. “But I must have seen the preview for Run Lola Run. In my mind’s eye, I have an image of a woman running through the streets, shot from different angles, all cut together. I remember wondering if it had been cut like that for the preview or if it really looked like that in the film. It seemed like a departure from traditional editing. I remember wondering about that.”

“How did you and Carol meet?” Anita asks Ronnie.

“We met at Curves,” Carol says. “Didn’t I tell you that, Anita?”

“No,” Anita says. She’s been wondering about the connection between Carol and the older lady.

“Ronnie has an awesome body for someone her age,” Carol says.

“I don’t think you need to add for someone her age,” Frank says to his wife.

“What’s this?” Joe says. “Frank defending the lady’s honor? Very noble, Frank.”

“You’re right, Frank. Ronnie has an awesome body, period.”

“I thought Curves was for the morbidly obese,” Joe says. “Were you morbidly obese, Ronnie?”

“No, Joe, I wasn’t, but thanks for asking.” says Ronnie, and everyone laughs.

“You never did answer the question, Ronnie,” says Joe. “Did you have a kinky phase in your life?”

“I’m having it right now,” Ronnie says.

“Right this minute?” says Joe.

“Possibly,” says Ronnie, laughing.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Riverdale, N.Y., 1965. Percy’s strange orange and pink landscapes are sealed behind a glossy surface—mysterious maps or aerial images of another planet’s surface—carefully lit to enhance the shine. Frank spends most weekends in his carriage-house studio working on several paintings at once, and in the final stage, he slathers them with Rhoplex, a plastic coating that, once completely dry, gives them the deep shine Percy requires. After the sun has gone down on the other side of the Hudson River, Percy sits and watches freshly slathered surfaces, milky cloud-cover while wet, turn transparent as they dry. Through the early part of an evening, with a chilled bottle of DuBonet and a slender box of Colt cigars that he swears up and down to Julia he isn’t inhaling, Percy can be found seated in a canvas and wood director’s chair watching the orange and pink surfaces return beneath the hardening layers of Rhoplex. In order to give the pronouncement—”Done! Finished! The end!”—which he does near the top of his lungs, the paintings needed to be 100 percent dry, at which time they are carried across the brick patio between the studio and the house, where space is made on a wall by taking down an existing painting, which then leans in the front hallway, waiting to be picked up and taken to Demetrius W Bratdorf, the small, but increasingly significant, SoHo gallery that represents Percy Sheldon MacLean. All of which five-year-old Frank MacLean might react to by saying, ”What’s the W for, dad?”

Such comments send Percy into dark tunnels of anger, because a lot of his activity is supposed to impress his son, and Frank has a definite knack for letting Percy know that, point blank, it doesn’t. Percy wonders if his kid, who has him so tightly wrapped around his little finger, isn’t the true genius in the house. Yes, it’s Frank who gets the big reactions, not Percy. And in so few words, so effortlessly delivered, thinks Percy.

“I don’t know what the fucking W is for,” Percy bellows, stomping back across the brick patio to the carriage-house studio, leaving his family in relative peace and quiet, which does, in fact, suit Frank.

In the same way that Percy wields pencil on paper and brush on masonite to process his world, Frank is pre-disposed to work things out in the English language. And he’s good at it. Zingers. Man, can the kid deliver.

Percy can never think of any good titles for his paintings, while five-year-old Frank has a seemingly endless supply to offer. Maybe it isn’t the actual title per se, thinks Percy. Maybe he just likes how Frank sees his work. To Percy, they’re decorative panels, but the gallery staff implores him not to say that. Ever. When potential clients ask about his paintings, they want to know what they represent, what they mean. They wonder if they are supposed to be able to see something in them. Find something. These are the clients Percy steers clear of at his openings. The ones twisting their heads sideways, both ways, back and forth, all around, trying to find something, while practicing the art of not spilling their drink. There is a lot of sideways head twisting at Percy’s openings and it makes him nervous, his Hathaway shirt damp under his black suit jacket.

When cornered by gallery staff and herded over to a sale-in-progress to be introduced to a buyer, Percy, for once in his life, has nothing to say until he can covertly lean in to read the card mounted on the wall, and then, with great theatrical emphasis, he tells the buyer that it’s called Orange Path To Pink Sea or A Dotted Line Divides Them or My Sister Is A Big Baby, and while the painting is being reconsidered based on a few words, Percy slips back to the bar to order another martini and loosen his tie. No one except Percy and Julia know that a five-year-old kid is making up the titles.

When Frank calls a painting Pointy White Mountains, Percy has to ask. “White mountains, Frank? What am I missing?”

Frank, sitting in the director’s chair in Percy’s studio, shrugs and says, “I forget.”

For all the hoopla surrounding Percy Sheldon MacLean, the brilliant young art director at Q&M and promising new abstract painter, one important fact about him remains unknown—except to Julia and then to Frank, in whom Percy confides during an attempt to spend more time with his son, drunkenly waking him up to ramble at him after coming home late from the Hickory House.

To his eternal consternation and shame, Percy Sheldon MacLean has no mind’s eye. He is officially a fraud.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Awful day at the photo lab. Totally out of the blue, Gina, the very quiet Filipina woman who does the same job I do, said, “This job is so boring and I can’t find the solution.” Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

I sit across from Gina on a stool at a big table. She works really hard and doesn’t usually talk unless I do. I jumped off my stool to look around for something, something to distract her. I found a piece of pink construction paper in a box from Staples. Light pink with blue flecks in it.

“What color would you call this?” I ask Gina.

“Old rose,” Gina says, sniffling. “It was very popular in the early ’90s in interior design. My sister’s house in the Philippines has walls and drapery that color with silk roses to match. That’s definitely old rose.”

“Oh,” I say and tape the 11 x 17 paper to the table in the empty space between us. “This can be our pink island,” I say, not having any idea of what Gina might think of such a thing. Sometimes I feel like I represent Caucasian Canadians—such a strange specimen for this group of immigrants to be exposed to.

“Our island of inspiration,” Gina says, wistfully.

“Yes,” I say, excitedly. “Let’s see if anyone notices.”

Gina laughs, and as the morning passes, we look at each other and make faces of fear and horror when people reach over Inspiration Island to hand us photos to sort into alphabetized piles. No one makes any comment about the pink paper. I draw lines on a lime green post-it, slide it under the island’s western shore and say, “It’s our new wharf.”

The work runs out and the boss is around, making the schedule for the next month. To look busy, I put photos in boxes that don’t need to be in boxes. Later, I’ll slice them open and stack them back where they were. The boss and her son Michael are spreading forms out across our worktable, arguing. My tape gun screeches, cutting through their voices. Michael pulls at the northeastern shore of Inspiration Island and asks, “Is this scrap paper?” I’m right there, holding the tape gun, but I don’t say anything. He’s pulling the paper. It’s taped down. The boss grabs the northwestern shore and pulls, finding it taped down too.

“What is this?” Michael asks irritably.

I can’t think of anything to say. I can’t say, “It’s Inspiration Island, it keeps us going.” Or, “It’s the color of Gina’s sister’s walls back in the Philippines.” Or, “It’s a performance art project and now you’re participating.”

“Paper?” I say and get my tape gun screeching down the lengths of boxes that don’t need to be taped closed. The boss and Michael rip two chunks off for scrap paper.

After lunch, Gina extends a yellow post-it note from her fingertip to mine. “We’ve been told that the surveillance cameras are already here.”

I crouch down behind the table to eat my Peanut Butter Cups.

On my last break, Dina, one of the six Filipinas, comes up behind me in the lunchroom and gives me a head massage without warning. It turns into a shoulder and back massage.

“Very strong hands,” I say.

“Relax,” she says. “My god, you’re intense. Just relax.”

The afternoon passes uneventfully, but my eyes keep dropping to the chunks missing from Inspiration Island. I think of them as shark attacks, teeth marks in Peanut Butter Cups left in the window panes of Gina’s sister’s rooms allowing her Old Rose drapery to billow inward knocking several slender vases of silk flowers into the glass shards on the floor.

On the bus ride home, I feel sort of dozy. I don’t like losing control. No. No I don’t. No no oh no. Oh-oh. No no.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

“Celia, I heard you played a role in the ad campaign,” says Oprah. “Can you explain that to our audience?”

A video is projected behind them, and the audience goes quiet. Celia looks over her shoulder—the meat. Packages of butcher-shop wrapped meat, tied together in pairs, have been flung over telephone wires, like Converse sneakers in a college town.

“The smell of meat represents rejection in my novels,” Celia begins, but she is drowned out by the audience reacting to the video. Crows are ripping at the meat packages, attacking each other; meat is falling to the ground. The belligerence of crow sounds obliterates Celia’s explanation. Oprah touches the tip of her nose like a drunk walking a white line on the side of a highway at night. Mecca Sonar comes on the screen playing “I Walk Alone” sometime in the 1990s. Celia is screaming into the microphone, “It’s my right to wear whatever the fuck I want to.” Oprah raises both hands to the audience, “We’ll bleep that out, but Celia, what was happening there?”

“The song is about a woman’s right to walk alone,” Celia says, letting go of Russell’s hand.

“But don’t you think that using an obscenity to make a point defeats the purpose of the song?” Oprah says. Camera two’s red light comes on, and producer Dean makes wild gestures to wrap it up. “We’ll talk to Celia when we come back from the break. We’ll be right back.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

“It was something my father said to my mother and she thought it was so funny,” Frank says as they cross Veronica’s deck to the side door.

“Was there a context?” asks Veronica, searching her purse for the keys. “Would he typically say something about using his penis to unlock the trunk of a car?”

“No,” says Frank, standing at the door, grocery bags hanging from both his hands. “That’s what she found funny about it.”

“Would he have used the word penis?” asks Veronica, sliding the key into the lock.

“Yes. That’s what was so funny to her, I think.”

Inside, Veronica puts away her groceries. Frank lies down on the bed. Veronica lies down beside him.

“My mother has a wonderful laugh,” Frank says. “I wouldn’t have realized it if I hadn’t told you the story, but yes, she has a wonderful laugh.”

“What’s it like?” Veronica asks, knowing that Frank can’t see her face with the light from the doorway behind her. She wants Frank to imitate his mother’s laugh. Veronica stays still, nearly invisible in the darkness.

“She puts one hand over her mouth when she laughs,” Frank says, bringing his head up off the pillow, putting a hand in front of his mouth. “Like this,” he says, and laughs warmly.

“I think this would make a very good fable,” Veronica says. “About a man who makes a comment about opening the trunk of his car with his penis. The man says it was something his father said to his mother, something she found funny. He lies on the bed and recalls his mother’s laugh, and his girlfriend says it’s wonderful to watch a son realize that his mother has a wonderful laugh.”

“Are you saying that you’re my girlfriend?” Frank asks.

“Yes,” says Veronica. “But I’m not really sure what makes a fable a fable. I was thinking more about the part of trying to open the trunk with a penis. If I added something about stone soup. Do you know the story of stone soup?”

“Sort of, but not really,” says Frank. ”How does it go?”

“A woman knocks on the door of a stranger’s house and asks the man who answers if she can make stone soup over his fire.”

“And this to you is like trying to open the trunk of a car with a penis?” says Frank, laughing how he laughs, which is a little bit like how his mother laughs, without the hand though.

“The man says he has nothing to add to the soup,” Veronica continues. “But he’s curious, so he invites the woman in. The woman gets the water boiling, drops in the stone and asks if there might be an old onion or a sprig of parsley around. The man reluctantly brings out an onion, and the woman says something about how much a few beans would add to the soup and, in this way, more food arrives, and in the end they enjoy a very fine soup together.”

“When did you decide to be my girlfriend?”

“Right around the time I turned the lion and the baboon into a giraffe and an elephant, I suppose,” says Veronica. “Maybe a bit before that.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Lesley arrives at the gym after having returned home to get her proper work-out clothes. Pulling off her motorcycle boots, she tells Veronica about the World War I party her friends had.

“Why?” asks Veronica.

“Because the host had a trench in his front yard from where he was building a new porch. It was great. He turned his gazebo into a Home Front Tent with an airtight stove, and the kitchen was a Parisian Café.”

“What kind of food was at the Parisian Café?” asks Veronica, from behind the desk at Curves.

“Oh, fancy cheeses and bread,” Lesley says. “I brought three kinds of pie.”

“What kinds of pie?” Veronica asks. “And why three?”

“I brought a fancy dessert pie for the Parisian Café: apple. A pot-roast pie for the Home Front Tent, but I told them it was squirrel,” she says, hanging up her leather jacket. “And I made root-vegetable pies for the Trenches. Boiled parsnips, potatoes and carrots inside hand-folded pastry. Individual pies.”

“They had individual root-vegetable pies in the trenches in World War I? Sounds pretty fancy.”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Lesley. “It seemed plausible. Someone else brought beans.”

“I’ll google it,” says Veronica, sliding over to the keyboard.

“Oh, you and your googling,” Lesley laughs.

“World War I and root-vegetable pie,” Veronica says as she types. “Nothing. It’s a non-googlable. No documents were found.”

“There was so much food.”

“What did people talk about?” Veronica asks.

“The war, influenza, village life, city life—what people might have faced at home, in the trenches and in Paris.”

“Like no kind of party I’ve ever been to,” Veronica says. “Or heard about.”

Lesley comes behind the desk. “Here,” she says. “Let me log onto Facebook, and I’ll show you the photos.” Veronica slides out of her way and Lesley finds the photo album. She tells Veronica the names of her friends; some of them are in costume. She’s looking for a photo of her partner, to show Veronica. “They had copies of newspapers from 1915 in the Home Front Tent, and Max made a film from footage around Vancouver in that era. They showed it on the wall of the tent.”

“Stop there for a sec,” Veronica says, on the photo of the film projected on the tent. “OK,” says Veronica. Lesley clicks on the photo and Veronica continues looking at smiling strangers in the Trench, lit-up by digital camera flashes in the rain. One guy is wearing a gasmask, another is drinking out of a tin cup with the yellow price tag still on the bottom. Veronica reads part of the funny caption beneath a man posing with the “squirrel” pie.

Lesley frequently tells Veronica how much she likes John, but she can’t find the photo of him. Veronica likes to hear about John, about how much Lesley likes him. “I wouldn’t trade him for anyone,” Lesley says, once they’re working out on the circuit. “But if I had a magic wand, there are five things I’d change about him right away.”

“Really?” Veronica says. “What’s number one on the list?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Lesley says.

“OK,” Veronica says. “What’s number five?”

“To read more,” Lesley says.

“What kind of things would you have him read?” Veronica asks.

“Smarty-pants books,” Lesley says. “So that when I’m with my friends talking about smarty-pants stuff he could join in, rather than sit there wishing we’d stop.”

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

It was time to implement the end, which was going to be tough with Veronica bubbling along beside him, grabbing his arm, prattling about the price of olive oil and the crazy idea of introducing him to her parents.

It was March already, three weeks to the day since they met, and Frank felt guilty about ending it. He bought Veronica shoes, used shoes, but she seemed happy with them. He would prefer that Veronica thought breaking up was her idea—this was easy enough with most women; all he need do was make classic remarks about the small amount of money he earned and women started their retreat, but Veronica wasn’t as interested in his money as most women. He was actually a little bit afraid that Veronica had fallen in love with him, or thought she had—or, worst of all, might tell him that she had. Frank felt an urgency to get it over with before things got any more complicated.

The olive oil was a very good price. Frank was thinking about picking up a bottle or two himself, and her parents actually sounded interesting, but really, he wasn’t going to meet any woman’s parents.

Settling into the wicker chair at her favorite Indian restaurant, Frank made his money comment. “Not sure how I’m going to get by,” he said, rubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers. Veronica reassured him that things would be OK. One of these “fiercely independent” women you hear about, Frank surmised. He added the part about being in debt and that his wife—and he chose to say “wife” this time instead of “ex-wife”—would be getting half his pension. He watched Veronica’s face, hoping to see her re-calculating—her future going up in smoke. Veronica asked Frank if he wanted a scoop of the mango chutney.

Frank reviewed his agenda. Exhibit distance—stage one of pulling away. Veronica would start to see that things were changing between them, but right at that moment she was over-the-moon about the butter chicken, wanting Frank to enthuse with her, and even though it was the best thing he’d ever eaten in his entire life, he did not join in. He refused to comment on it.

“What are you thinking?” Veronica asked. Like nails on a chalkboard to Frank. He couldn’t believe Veronica didn’t get the irony—she was the one who said she couldn’t abide clichés. Is there any bigger cliché than a woman asking a man what he’s thinking?

Frank was making his completely-without-expression face, but maybe he needed to reconsider this—maybe he needed to use the very-tired look or extremely-bored face. Maybe she wouldn’t ask, “What are you thinking?” if it was more obvious.

“I was just thinking about how happy I am since I met you,” Frank said, kicking himself for saying the opposite of what he wanted to say, knowing he was only making things more difficult, but it was what she wanted to hear.

Veronica did notice the distance. Acutely. And she noticed that his response was a cliché. Frank was simply telling her what she wanted to hear, while he thought his own thoughts, which might well be, “How the hell do I get out of this thing?” He’d started acting distant. Veronica had noted the look on his face when she told him she wanted him to meet her parents. Without expression—or so he imagined. Stage one, thought Veronica. Frank had begun stage one.

They sat in the car for a moment before carrying in the four quarts of olive oil, the new, but slightly used, shoes and Veronica’s weekly supply of fruit and vegetables. Frank couldn’t believe it when Veronica, who had been happy all day, calmly said, “I guess it would be pretty hard to break up with me, the way I’m behaving. I mean, wouldn’t that be strange? You know, in a sort of fictional way. What if a guy was trying to break up with a woman while they were having such a good day together?”

Was it a fluke? A guess? Or just his lucky day? Essentially, it didn’t really matter. It was there between them—and by her invitation.

Veronica suggested they have a bath. Once in the tub, Frank seemed to have forgotten how they had both fit in there the week before. Veronica asked him to sit back and submerge his slightly stinky feet, thus giving her access to the depth of the hot, soothing water.

Frank picked up the plastic tumbler of ice water from the ledge of the bathtub. It sloshed into the tub near Veronica’s left knee.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, placing his free hand over his heart.

Veronica, intent on trusting Frank, closed her eyes and relaxed, sinking farther into the water. She was slowly exhaling when the cold water hit her exposed knee. She gasped and grabbed the sides of the tub.

“You did that on purpose,” she said, and yes, she was angry.

“Your accusation wouldn’t hold up in any court in the land,” Frank said quickly, brutally. Veronica knew how much Frank hated lawyers and courts. She wondered if he wanted to start a fight, something to position them closer to the end.

Women exhausted him. The very idea of women exhausted him. He could really only do a few weeks before he started thinking about changing things up, getting another type of woman. He’d already figured out what he wanted next: a tall, young blonde with big tits. Enough with the short, intellectual type. For god’s sake, Veronica was nearly his age. He could easily get 10 or even 15 years younger. So why wouldn’t he? He noticed people in the street looking at them, thinking, “Why is a good-looking, well-dressed guy like him with her? He could get anyone he wanted.”

Frank lay on the bed and she lay down beside him. “I’m sorry I’m so overly sensitive,” he said, knowing she’d have to say, “About what?” Which she did, right on cue.

“I read the story you wrote for the online magazine. The unbearable lightness of whatever it was,” he said.

“Oh,” Veronica said, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him. “And how did it make you feel?”

“It hurt. I didn’t like it.”

Veronica thought about the story, which was based on a guy she went out with five or six years ago, a guy who was very difficult to understand. Whenever they’d started getting close he disappeared, and when she asked him about it, he said that when he really liked a woman he needed distance from her. At that time, because she was naïve, she took that to mean that he was telling her he liked her. Distance. In the end, distance turned out to mean that he was using her for sex and that he had no intention of being in any sort of relationship with her. He came and went, delivered excuses, lied, used her and disappeared. Distance.

Veronica didn’t want Frank to feel hurt—but jeepers, everyone has a past. She tried to reassure him and suggested that he not read her stories if they upset him. She wondered how this would impact her writing, knowing that every sentence, every word of her constructions could hurt Frank—and there was that unpleasant feeling that she’d done something wrong. She had hurt him.

Frank’s baggage was considerably more than her own, but now he had something on her—and there was nothing she could do about it. Guilty as charged. She’d had sex before she met him. There wasn’t a court in the land that would believe otherwise.

“What have you done in the past when this came up?” she asked, hoping to learn what she could do to help the situation.

“I’ve always put distance between myself and the subject. The subject —that would be you.”

Frank had read the story about the man needing distance and seen that she’d fallen for the I-need-distance-thing before. She’d practically written the script for how to end it.

Frank presses his face to her neck, noticing that her tears have already rolled down her face, to where he is hiding, awaiting her reaction.

Distance. He wants distance. Christ, thinks Veronica, how much distance does this guy require? They live in different cites, he can only see her once a week and he’s made it pretty clear it’s temporary. Like his profile said: “Not looking for commitment or a relationship of any kind.” And now he needs more distance, and distance is starting to seem like a good idea to her, too.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Veronica, standing near the sales table piled too high with copies of the visiting author’s new novel, frowns heavily, takes up the bulk of her apron skirts and wipes her hands with a sort of angsty wringing. This doesn’t result in drier hands because the apron is made out of cotton broadcloth, which isn’t absorbent. Its smooth finish seems to repel wetness, disallowing it from performing its very function. Absorption. Veronica believes the apron to be more of a prop—a symbolic affectation—than anything useful to her duties at the reading, where she re-positions wayward cheeses and re-fills cracker baskets. She ends up doing these tasks because she’s the woman on the committee and she’s an unpublished author, the only unpublished author on the committee of five. And the only woman. An unpublished woman in an apron dicking around with the fucking cheese, she thinks, sliding a slightly resistant block of cheddar back toward the center of the cutting board with the tip of a somewhat inappropriate knife. More of a machete, but the only thing in the knife family they could find in the back room of the book store and now the machete is a part of tradition at the readings that has turned into a series, without anyone suggesting that it become a series. The committee isn’t a formal body; they were just some writers who wanted to bring in some authors for cozy readings, and lit agents started contacting the store when their authors were in town for more formal events, looking for a more accessible venue. The lit agents like their authors to do a second event, something free, to promote a book—to connect with readers and other writers, writers who weren’t inclined to turn up at festivals they hadn’t been invited to read at.

Veronica thought about tea towels as the audience straggled in. She loved the plaids. She frequently picked them up, sold in sets of three or four with a cardboard label holding them together, anywhere she saw them, and she wanted to buy them, but she didn’t. The whole thing bothered her. She’d hang a tea towel from her fridge door in good faith, thinking, “This time it will be different,” but it wasn’t. If she wanted a plate, a dry plate, to put a piece of toast on, and if all her plates had just been washed, she’d think hard about images of 1950s women in aprons drying plates on old TV sitcoms—Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best—the swirl and squeak of the plate being dried on both sides with two hands, but when she did it the same way, the plate was not dry. It did not dry. The water was just sort of spread out. So she’d given up on tea towels and put the plates in the cupboards wet, piling them in stacks and when she pulled one out and it was wet, she’d get the next one down, but it was wet from the one above, so she’d go for the third one down and it was dry, but it had circles from where water had dried—eventually—and either she used the not exactly clean plate or she went farther into the stack, looking for a clean and dry plate for a piece of toast, until eventually she just put the fucking toaster away, in the drawer below the oven. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck the whole fucking thing.

Veronica flattened the apron skirt, the non-absorbent broadcloth, against her thighs. She stabbed a somewhat mangled lump of Swiss, lifted it, and plunked it down next to the cheddar.

“Got something against the Swiss?” Mr. Cheese said sarcastically. Veronica’s shoulders dropped. She closed her eyes, took a breath and thought about counting to 10. Mr. Cheese wasn’t his real name, but that’s what they called him. She didn’t, but they did. The men on the committee.

Tonight the reading felt more like a game of Clue than a literary event. Colonel Mustard in the Library with a Candlestick. The Unpublished Woman in the Book Store with a Machete. Mister Cheese in Everyone’s Way with Yet Another Irritating Remark.

The machete was part of the tradition: writers listening to published authors who’d been given the big bucks to read to tittering audiences at the Writers’ Festival, taking questions from their adoring fans. “How did you get to be so wonderful?”—questions like that. Yes, the machete was a good part of the tradition here on East 13th, where unpublished writers didn’t call themselves authors and most of their trips to the book store were to offload compendiums. Writer’s Market 1989 or even less abstractly titled editions—Very Young Women’s Extra Short Canadian Fiction Writer’s Market 1984—4,000,000+ copies sold—and somehow when it was picked up at a yard sale, years ago, there had been a sense of possibility and hope in carrying the book home to begin. To begin. Over and over again.

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

When I got in, safely off the wheel—as Jack London called the bicycle in Martin Eden: the wheel—my telephone message system was blinking. It was my mother, at 11 a.m., saying she hadn’t heard from me for a while. I talk to her every week, basically. I resisted this for years. For years, she’s wanted to talk to me every week. These days, it seems good to stay in touch more. She’s 90.

I studied her voice as she left her message and she did very well with the directions I’ve given her—how to not sound too urgent if it isn’t, because I may come in too late to call, and it’s worrisome if she sounds emphatic. Hepped up. I decided to call right then, before making dinner. Twinges of guilt about wanting to get it over with.

I phoned, she picked up, but their answering machine started feeding back in a slow unravelling sound like a Halloween ghost: wwwoooooooohhh. “I’ll call you back,” she said and began the process of replacing the receiver back in its cradle. I hung up, waiting, looking into the darkness beyond the computer screen, towards the mountains that she loves, where I taught skiing. The never-ending mountains on the other side of the inlet.

Back on the line, she had problems with the volume on the phone and she called for John to come and help her. He turned it down and I demonstrated my voice a couple of times, but it was still too loud and John returned to fiddle with the volume on her hearing aid. She was about to make fishcakes and I was happy to keep things short, but I wanted to let her know of my new hours at work. She wrote down the days after repeating them back to me.

“Yes, that’s right. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Yup.”

She asked how I was and I said I’d been busy, and I mentioned that I was seeing someone on Sundays, but she didn’t quite catch what I meant. I told her about him last time I saw her, but it was part of a larger conversation.

“I’m seeing a fella and Sunday is date day,” I said, feeling decidedly circa Anne Of Green Gables.

She still isn’t getting it—the phone isn’t quite right and I think she wants to get to her fishcakes.

“His name is Max,” I say.

“Pardon, dear?”

“The fella I see on Sundays. His name is Max,” I say, wondering if the sibilance of the x is squealing in her hearing aid. ”Maxwell,” I say, wishing I had fishcakes that I needed to get to.

“Maxwell Kent,” she says, to my amazement.

“That’s right, but how did you remember his last name?

“It’s not a name you forget,” she says.

“I see,” I say.

“Is he nice?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “He is.” Wanting to summarize and move on to the remainder of the evening, I say, “He’s not a jackass.”

She laughs. We make a few more remarks about technology, volume and fishcakes, and then she wants to get off the phone.