wow, thank you for the review. i’ll definitely take some of your suggestions into consideration. as far as pure opinion, however, i must defend the story itself. all true. including age, thought processes at the time, reactions by women at club bullwinkle’s, and intoxicated running. :) ...i do appreciate the detailed review. cheers!
Novel Treatments / Ch. 4 "The Vinegar Tasting" Part 1
Chapter 4
ooo THE VINEGAR TASTING ooo
We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it… The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling.
-excerpt from The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff
ooo
It had never occurred to me that I might have made some bad decisions. In fact, it seemed to me that I made relatively no decisions at all. I rolled through life, mostly, bouncing off events and people like a pinball.
In a class on comparative religion at the age of nineteen, for example, I was asked a bonus question on the final exam: “What is Zen?” My answer: “What is not Zen?” It was not meant to be a smug or cocky answer, and I did not expect to get credit for it. It was simply a reflection of the ten minutes I’d spent trying to eliminate irrelevant explanations before becoming frustrated at the relevance of them all and nearly leaving the question unanswered. My initial response, then, was, “This is.” But I felt that it was a little too definitive; it read as if I thought I had the market cornered on wisdom. My second thought was to draw a stick-figure representation of The Vinegar Tasters, but that seemed a bit trite as well. So, in the end, I decided to answer the question with a question and leave it all up to the Great Whatever.
I got the bonus points and received an A+. So that was that. I’d solved the Great Mystery. Free game for me—the pinball!
Another example of life seemingly working itself out the less I tried was when I awoke to the sound of my former roommate, Donna, knocking back a gallon of orange juice straight from the carton. She was extremely dehydrated for the millionth consecutive morning, as was I, from drinking heavily the night before. On the kitchen counter were several papers, notebooks, books, volumes, pens, pencils, highlighters, and a bottle of vodka, (hers,) a bottle of whiskey, (mine,) and a jug of wine, (ours.) It was a warm, summer day and I was feeling lazy—not a content kind of lazy, but a what-the-hell-am-I-doing-waking-up-every-morning-feeling-guilty-and/or-useless kind. After a brief moment of hating myself, I decided to go for a run. As I was putting on socks and tying shoestrings, however, a gloom gathered around my spirit and forced upon me a feeling of futility and desperation. I put forth a question to Donna:
“Do you think we might have an alcohol problem?” I asked her. After draining the last drops of juice and bringing her blood sugar back to an acceptable level, she exhaled loudly, her upper lip glistening, and said:
“No—God no! Look, this is what people do in their early-twenties. We have fun, but I know a lot of people who are doing much worse.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and snapped her exposed bra strap back into position. “Don’t say things like that! Fuck. Now you’ve got me feeling all… dirty.” She let out a playful giggle. I responded with one of my own. Pushing the matter aside, grateful for the reassurance, I stood and stretched, took three shots of whiskey, and went for a run. It was a gorgeous, young day and, while running, I ran into a gorgeous, young jogger. We quickly became running partners, among other things, and I remember thinking one day, after one of our cool-downs, “I’d have never met this girl if I’d sat around worrying Donna and myself over nothing. Thank the Great Whatever I’ve got someone to talk sense to me.”
A few weeks later, a friend and I were at a club downtown. We’d split a pitcher of dark beer and were having a great time talking about what a wonderful, untapped resource the gay-bars were for finding attractive girls—there was no competition, and by the time they’d discovered our heterosexuality, we were already embedded in their sweaty, gyrating midst. Then, after a silence and out of nowhere, my friend slid a napkin over to me on which he‘d written:
I THINK I MIGHT BE AN ALCOHOLIC…
I looked at him, surprised, and saw that he was not joking. When he excused himself moments later to go to the restroom, I thought of how I’d made basically the same comment to Donna, and how I could’ve missed out on meeting the best running-buddy in the history of running-buddies had I chose to dwell on it. One thought came to mind: “What is not Zen?” I took the pen from the ash-strewn table and turned the napkin over. On the opposite side, under the pulsating reds, blues, and yellows of the club lights, I wrote back:
DEAR FELLOW “ALCOHOLIC,”
WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS,
MAKE A WHISKEY-SOUR AND BE
GLAD IT DIDN’T GIVE YOU AIDS.
I’m not sure what happened to him over the long haul, as we eventually lost touch, but that night my soothing advice helped to get him laid by a stunning, Italian girl in black, leather pants so tight it looked like she was wearing a roll of electrical tape. He never did thank me.
I hope she didn’t give him AIDS.
ooo
So anyway, when the thought of making bad decisions entered my head after the telling of my Lilly-story, my immediate, Zen-ish reflex was to brush it off. When that didn’t work, I tried reasoning it away. And when that didn’t work, I reluctantly tried to confront it.
I had all the time in the world to ponder the subject. I kept my own hours, working on the murals from noon until whenever. As this was my first, official, paying job in the realm of art, I had relatively no idea how long each mural should take—and being, as I was, paid by the hour, I had long since determined that the length of time it should take would in no way dictate the length of time I would take. What did they expect? That I was going to work super-efficiently so that I might get back to rolling tables, stacking chairs, and clearing soup bowls? I’d have it done by spring; that was my only pledge.
My plan was to paint those cheesy murals, and paint them well, but to extend the work as far as possible into the new year. This would be easy enough. I had only provided a rough sketch to Mr. Watson, who passed it on to Mr. Gordon—Doug, to me—for approval. So, for the next few months, the only word I needed to know was, ‘almost:’
Got it figured out? Almost.
Just about finished? Almost.
Aren’t you sick of staring at those hideously bright colors all day? Almost.
Are you done yet, for Pete’s sake? Almost.
It was, I decided, to be a paid learning-experience. I would perfect my skills at selecting, matching, and layering colors. I would paint and re-paint as many times as I needed to achieve the effect I desired. And, best of all, I would do it in a fairly stress-free environment. There were no grades to worry about like in college, and, at most, I was merely painting stylized cartoons. Other perks included a semi-celebrity status among the hotel staff, and a ‘Who Cares?’ policy concerning my appearance. I shaved maybe half-a-dozen times from November through April. It was glorious!
I sat on the edge of the four-foot scaffold I’d been provided by Dave in maintenance, mixing a plastic-cup full of Cobalt-Blue and Carolina-Green to make a Carolina-Cobalt-Blue-Green; it was getting uglier and muddier by the second. In my thoughts, visions of a coked-up racist and a gas station-robbing roommate battled for supremacy. And my role in the respective matters placed a quivering hand on an accusatory, black bible and tried to take the fifth amendment with as much transparent honesty as possible, whispering excuses into my conscience.
The irony of my surroundings did not escape my busy brain: I had completed an eighteen inches-tall border around the perimeter, at the top of the dining room walls. It consisted of a simple, blurry background of greens, violets, and blues—representing the interior of a jungle as it might appear through the film of a plastic, cheese wrapper. Over this background, I had painted large, tropical flowers; none of which were accurately depicted or, for that matter, actually exist on this planet, unless by pure accident. The colors were chosen to accentuate the new furniture: dining room chairs with a similar motif in their fabric. The ceiling had been painted a dark, forest green over which a false ceiling of fake, bamboo lattice had been constructed and hung, draped with fake greenery and leafy vegetation. Stemming from the west wall, the maintenance crew had built a large fountain with several, life-size, palm trees and a thick carpet of fake flowers and flora. Behind that was the beginning of my first mural: a scenic view overlooking acres of jungle, with close-ups of more flowers and tall grasses in the foreground. I even had the silhouette of a monkey leaning out from a tall palm tree, sharing the view with our guests. The mural I was then working on when Joshua approached me and said, “Hey,“ was an underwater scene, using bright colors that complimented the painted border and furniture, showing a coral reef with a variety of angel fish and a large sea turtle, swimming around and having a great ole’ time. And through the dining room windows along the east wall, overlooking a cold and graying Midwestern world, I could see that it was beginning to snow.
ooo JOSHUA ooo
“Hey,” called out Joshua, “what time are you going to be finished today?” I smiled at my friend walking toward me through a fake, half-finished, tropical wonderland, brushing aside the plastic, palm fronds as he passed the fake fountain wearing a comically tropical, pink-flowered, button-up shirt and stretching his arms into a thick, brown-leather coat. His eyes, it occurred to me, were exactly the color of blue I was unsuccessfully trying to mix in my cup.
“Why?” I replied.
“Well, I was going to see if you wanted to do something tonight.” I was not much the type for making plans. Neither was Joshua. This similarity was a load-bearing pillar in our friendship.
“I’ll probably paint until the natural light is gone. I can’t see after that anyway, with these party lights they’ve strung up. I don’t know—another hour maybe. What do you have planned?”
“A movie?”
“Yeah, sure. Maybe.” I didn’t want to commit.
“Alright. Well, I’ll give you a call around eight.”
“Yeah. Sounds good. Drive safe.” It was nearly five o’clock.
Joshua had become my best friend somehow. I can’t say that I had become his best friend, but he had certainly become mine. He was the only tie I had left to the really real world and the natural order of things. He was a non-crazy. He had renter’s insurance.
Joshua was extremely spiritual, while I was a post-neo-spiritual intellectual. He believed in God, while I believed in discussing the possibility of a God and what, exactly, He might expect from us should He, in fact, exist. The Great Whatever.
I finished painting for the day and cleaned my brushes in a water bucket just as the daylight was dying; fading down behind a fresh coat of snow. I stood for a moment and looked at my day’s work in the amber glow of the streaming, party lights with the pale blue of the wintry park making fun of me through the large windows. I couldn’t really decide if the whole idea was promising or asinine, but I was fairly pleased with the overall composition of the painting I’d begun. And besides, I thought, the very wealthy man behind the new look must surely have consulted a designer or two before hiring me to run with it. Rich people don’t do impulsive things with their money; that’s why they’re rich.
“I, on the other hand, do extremely impulsive things like buying shitty cars because, well, I needed one that day.” I said facetiously to myself as I started up the Dodge. “Sorry.” I apologized. I had not yet concluded whether or not I believed in a vehicle’s soul. It seemed best not to take chances. The engine made a deep sound. The muffler had a hole in it, I assumed. The steering wheel and the stick were bitterly cold in my bare hands. The headlights flipped up and some whining noise in the dashboard, which sounded just like a distant police-siren, called out into the lonely woods surrounding the hotel for miles in all directions. I carved through the new snow and headed home.
Parking the Dodge on the street outside the house, I cut the engine and sat in the warmth of the car for a few minutes. I could still not entirely wrap my brain around the events of the past few days. I had not talked to my new friend, Lilly, since she called the morning after the arrest to see if I could bail her out of jail. It had been a funny conversation, in a sad way. She had sounded as if nothing had really happened; like she was calling me because she had locked herself out of her car or something trivial. “Hey, baby.“ she had said. “You think you could post bail for me?“ This girl actually wanted me, the guy who’d summoned the police in the first place, to pay five-hundred dollars to get her out. And, honestly, if I’d have had the money I probably would have paid it. She was not a bad person, just a possible cocaine addict. And a racist, maybe, but that stuff is almost always the product of bad upbringing. She had called me, “baby,“ on the phone. She had called me, “baby,” from jail, for Pete‘s sake!
Besides that, I never did get to ask her sister about spying on us.
Then, there was the matter of Detective Peterson and my missing roommate. No one had seen or heard from Clinton since his disappearance over a week ago. We’d already sold his remaining four computers—the ones we hadn’t tossed out the window and busted into a thousand pieces on the back porch—for eighty dollars at a pawn shop. I didn’t feel comfortable selling his things at the time, but Bailey assured me that Clinton deserved it for abandoning us without an advance on the rent. It made sense, but I was still positive—wrong, as it turned out, but positive then—that we’d see him again soon, and that he’d have some nearly rational explanation for vanishing. Anyway, we got a hundred and fifty dollars for the porno.
And dusted on top of all that mess, like rainbow sprinkles on a hot shit sundae, was a handful of smaller issues: my wounded face and back, the new project at work that I had absolutely no confidence in myself for completing, my leaky gas tank, and, of course, the ever-present problem of bills, bills, bills
What now?
I looked around my neighborhood as I sat in my car and felt old. I was not old by human standards, only twenty-three, but looking out my windshield at the reflection in the wet blacktop of the ‘help wanted‘ sign in the broken window of the tobacco shop across the street; and the lights that chased each other around the window of the video store; and the 24-hour lights of Mr. D‘s Gas N‘ Go just up the road; and the two, college students walking briskly north on the sidewalk; and the glow of downtown over the tops of the buildings; and the traffic swooshing by on East St.; I felt old, old, old. I felt disconnected from my surroundings and moving farther away still with each second. I felt old, like the universe must feel old—expanding out and out. And not just everything moving away from some central point, like an explosion; everything moving away from everything else, too, like millions of separate explosions exploding. A phenomenon that can only be explained by black holes or the shape of time itself: If every galaxy is exploding away from its own center then, at some point, every galaxy must be getting closer to surrounding galaxies. But, in as much as I understand the theories of physics, that is not what is happening. Everything is moving apart from itself and from everything else; nothing is getting closer to anything. Like every particle and subatomic particle is receding. Like every proton, neutron, and electron is wired to the internet and leasing its own efficiency apartment and working from home with blinds closed, doors boarded shut, and avoiding everything else. That‘s how I felt. Like I was going nowhere, but that, even by going nowhere, I was somehow going elsewhere. Sitting still was not even an option, it seemed, in a world where nothing else would just sit still; even by staying put you were moving away by proxy. My Great Whatever theory seemed to be just that: Whatever.
I was not allowed to simply not move.
I could be no hummingbird or helicopter.
To not decide was to decide.
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plotjuggler reviewed Version 4 -
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To be fair in reviewing this piece, I had to go back and read it several times before I “got it”. I don’t have a clue how this section fits into your story as a whole, anymore than someone reading my own random chapters, but for all practical purposes, you seem to have hit your “mark” as stated in the reviewer notes. I vividly saw “black, leather pants so tight she looked like she was wearing a roll of electrical tape”. Also, “embedded in their sweaty, gyrating midst”. I could smell such a place. I don’t know if I would totally be interested in the “subject” matter of your novel, without some prodding, but the opening of Chapter Four of “The Vinegar Tasting” was thought-provoking, carefully edited, and “tastefully” written.
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KezH reviewed Version 4 -
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Have to say it is pretty hard to review something when its so abstract but that’s doesnt mean to say I dont like this extract. In fact I think it really works although my only comment is that it reads like thoughts and not so much character development.
I think the way you have structured it really works and I will look to read further parts…
Chasness reviewed Version 4 -
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I’m not really sure this is a novel treatment. As far as I am to understand, treatments are usually “break-downs” of the overall story. With that said, what I liked:
The description. How the main character uses his paint, what he’s doing, and his view of the world around him. I think it’s all really interesting.
What I didn’t like is that it’s too “que sara sara.” While the character is adept at describing his surroundings, thoughts, and feelings, he really doesn’t care. Or maybe he cares, but it’s unimportant. As a reader if the character doesn’t find any of it important, it’s hard for me to find an impetus to care about what’s going on.
Other than that, keep working on it.
Betty13 reviewed Version 3 -
Read 67% of the Item
I am going to stop here. How old are these people? In the young twenties most are not as aware of self-destruction. They are busy thinking about getting the latest phone, the hippest clothes, the hottest sex partner, the highest tolerance to any drug they choose for experimentation. There is a conflict here, they are early 20s’, ya? They sound more like the jaded 30’s with a realization that nothing exciting has happened since their early 20’s. See?
I don’t mean to tear your story apart. I encourage you to think it over and either use the experiences of the early 20’s for flash backs to a better time for the early 30’s who realizes its time to shape up or ship out so-to-speak.
Good luck.
“In fact, it seemed to me that I made relatively no decisions at all.” -Awkward wording.
” Another example of life seemingly working itself out the less I tried was when I awoke to the sound of my former roommate,” – Again Awkward
“notebooks, books, volumes,” – seems redundant
“(hers,)” – “(mine,)” – Use one or the other > () or ,
“what-the-hell-am-I-doing-waking-up-every-morning-feeling-guilty-and/or-useless kind.” – again, one or the other> I personally think useless would work better
“I stood and stretched, took three shots of whiskey, and went for a run.” – As someone who has had plenty of experience with liquor, this just would not happen. The character would either begin feeling dizzy and forget the jog or throw up a few minutes into it.
Gorgeous used twice and two close together.
“We quickly became running partners, among other things, and I remember thinking,” – This sounds rushed, while people are running and panting for air, how did they become friends and other within 2-3 minutes?
“untapped resource the gay-bars were for finding attractive girls” – true > I loved the gay bars in Manhattan, however awkwardly worded
“and by the time they’d discovered our heterosexuality, we were already embedded in their sweaty, gyrating midst.” – They’d have to be far smoother than that because that would anger the women going to get away from the CONSTANT futile attempts made upon our virtue in straight clubs
“I THINK I MIGHT BE AN ALCOHOLIC…” – buzz kill At first it is light hearted and bohemian in nature and now suddenly the tone is stopped dead with an over dramatic declaration of addiction.
Lino reviewed Version 3 -
Read 100% of the Item
I love this!! It’s written in a kind of a laid back, slightly ironic style that I feel totally captures the narrator’s personality completely. Wonderful language, great flow and well balanced. My favorite sentence is the one in the very beginning:
It had never occurred to me that I might have made some bad decisions. In fact, it seemed to me that I made relatively no decisions at all. I rolled through life, mostly, bouncing off events and people like a pinball.
That line draws me in completely, and after that, it’s impossible not to read the rest. The style reminds me of Norris Church Mailer. Excellent! It most certainly warmed my heart :-)
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