Laundry day (tomorrow)

My freshman roommate in college was a kid from one of the most exclusive prep schools in the nation, the scion of a family of not inconsiderate means. The amount of monthly allowance he received above and beyond expenses for books and board exceeded my entire personal budget for an entire semester, yet he managed to run through it all in the course of two or three blowout days whenever the check would come in.

Of all his boorish mannerisms, though, the one that bothered me the most was when, toward the end of each of the two semesters in which we were forced to live together, my roommate would waken in the morning, crawl through the near-darkness of the Jefferson dormitory basement rooms, and settle next to his overflowing laundry basket. Then he’d remove a pair of underwear from its depths, sniff it gingerly, and hold the increasing pile in his lap until he’d found a pair that, while not fresh, were at least not reeking. Then he’d proceed to wear it for another week. The actual process of laundering his clothing during the course of a semester was beyond him. In the autumn and again in January he arrived at school with a mass of dry-cleaned prepwear that would grow progressively more grungy and moldy as he used them week after week. Then at semester’s end, he’d haul home several bags of stinking clothing for his parents to take care of, one way or another.

It seems to me these days that my freshman roommate was a highly resourceful man.

I’d like to blame the fact that I have no clean clothing today on the fact that when I’m trying to finish up writing and revising a book, I’m highly blinkered and absent-minded about things like laundry, bill-paying, and bathing. The truth, however, is that while in college I might have fastidiously washed and ironed my things on a weekly basis, after a good twenty-eight years of taking care of myself I’m no longer as particular. I have enough boxer briefs and socks in my drawer that I can go for a few weeks without worrying about running out. Ironing? Pfeh. A t-shirt and a pair of jeans that aren’t actually caked with filth are good enough for the likes of me. When my basket of dirties gets full, my first instinct isn’t, My, I really should have a busy laundry day! No, it’s, I wonder if Target carries bigger laundry baskets?

On mornings like today, though, after weeks of neglecting my washperson duties, I find myself running my fingers along the bare bottoms of my dresser drawers and contemplating an outfit that consists of the only clean clothes I have left: an outsized caftan from my larger days, a pair of sweatpants with legs that stop mid-calf, an ancient jockstrap, and a pair of striped clown socks from 1993. And it seems to me and my nose that my college roommate had a pretty good thing going.

Not that it means I’ll actually do any laundry, mind you. I’ll spend time writing about it instead.

Red Dawn

It was a few weeks ago that our friend and neighbor, Chad, informed me that one of his young daughters had met a teen idol. “We were walking the puppy down the street and guess who we saw?” he asked.

“Um,” I said, not having a clue. Chad can be like an excitable puppy who barks like mad at the sight of a leaf blown by the wind, so for all I knew, he and his daughter could’ve seen a squirrel. “I give up.”

“Josh Peck!” he crowed.

“Josh Peck!” I replied in surprised.

“I know! Josh Peck! Right there on the sidewalk! Right?”

I caved. “Who’s Josh Peck?”

Josh Peck turned out to be one of the stars of Drake & Josh, a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, of which Chad’s daughter is apparently a huge fan. I, being somewhat outside the demographically either mentally (Chad) or physically (his daughter), had never heard of it. “They’re in town for the remake of Red Dawn,” Chad explained. “They’re filming right around the corner.”

“Did she get to talk to this Josh Peck guy?” I asked.

“No,” admitted Chad. “But he petted the dog!”

I’m willing to bet that’s one dog who never gets washed again.

Michigan’s been used more and more over the last couple of years for the filming of a lot of Hollywood projects, and it’s seemed as if my little suburb has been one of the epicenters of it. Probably the most visible project with which we had to cope was Sigourney Weaver’s Prayers for Bobby a couple of years ago, which tied up the Mont’s church, the restaurant next door (a stylish enough eatery that somehow doubled as both a scary, seedy gay bar and the fern-covered restaurant frequented by middle-class suburban moms), as well as most of Royal Oak’s downtown streets. There was also a month in which it was impossible to dodge the filming of dueling Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore movies, no matter where we seemed to go.

Lately the neighborhood’s been completely invaded by Red Dawn, however. Whenever I drive out on an errand, I see signs for cast and crew parking. The other day when I drove home from Target, I passed a small battalion of armed and uniformed communists taking a Doritos break on the side of the road. Even when we leave Royal Oak, we’re running into the production. One night when we went to our favorite karaoke bar, a good ten miles north, we found the street in front completely blocked off and shut down. Tanks were pointed at the bar’s front door and military vehicles completely surrounded it. Despite the loud music and the festive atmosphere inside, the place looked as if it were under siege. A glum security guard stood on guard to make sure no one climbed on the tanks. Which was tempting.

But honestly. Isn’t Red Dawn one of those movies that should never be remade? And no, I’m not saying it in the way that some movie executive should have when they heard that Melanie Griffith wanted to one-up Born Yesterday. I’m saying it more like this: wasn’t one Red Dawn enough? I think the death of Patrick Swayze has made some people a little sentimental for his movies, but surely this was among the least of them.

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From the back cover:

On his first sea voyage away from the magical city of Cassaforte, seventeen-year-old Nic Dattore awakens to find the vessel overrun by marauding pirates—and everyone else on board kidnapped or killed. After slaying the pirate who attacked him, Nic tosses a torch into a cache of gunpowder and blows up the ship.

Washed up on a deserted island, Nic and a motley crew of castaways decide to commandeer the pirate ship to get home. They battle pirates, assassins, and a cursed ship with a powerful secret while racing against time to save Cassaforte from a diabolical plot.

A Traveler to Nascenza

It is so nice—so nice, I tell you—to read a book you’ve just finished writing and realize that it isn’t a piece of crap.

A Traveler to Nascenza is the third fantasy set in my medieval Venice-inspired country of Cassaforte. It’s the story of Petro Divetri, the younger brother of Risa Divetri, who was at the center of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Petro’s main problem is that he has a remarkable sister—a hero several times over who occupies a singular place in her city’s history—when he is not at all remarkable himself. He finds himself either falsely admired for his connection, or bullied and despised for it. When the persecution gets out of hand, he’s sent away from the school where he’s lived for several years on a pilgrimage to the remote religious shrine of Nascenza, deep in the countryside. His best friend accompanies him, and Petro is so anxious not to be dogged by his own reputation that the two boys decide to play a schoolboy prank on the other pilgrims and swap identities, pretending to be one another.

It’s a piece of mischief that goes awry when Petro’s friend is kidnapped for political motivations along the way. The rest of Petro’s path to Nascenza is frantic and desperate as he tries to find his friend once more and uncovers a plot that threatens to ruin not only his country’s future, but his sister’s wedding. And boy, nobody wants to upset hot-tempered Risa Divetri when her marriage is at stake.

I envisioned and plotted the story before last year’s elections, and thought of it as a commentary on what happens when a reactionary minority group, incensed by the background of a country’s leader, resorts to domestic terrorism as a means not only to force the country’s hand, but to reduce its citizens into a state of panicked fear. It turned out to be more of a timely topic than I imagined.

The night I finished A Traveler to Nascenza, I stayed up until two in the morning to get it done. I knew early that evening I only had a little bit to go and that I needed to get it out of me while the words were flowing. Besides, I wanted to see how it ended! I’d drawn up a broad sketch of the story last year, true, but as always, I deviated some from the outline. The guard that Petro works with after the kidnapping discovers his true identity well before I originally intended—but she was smarter than I anticipated, and not easily duped. I’d planned for Petro to run across a younger child in the book who in the outline was outright antagonistic. As I wrote the story, Petro ended up treating the kid very decently and as a little brother, so I had to make the child more sympathetic than I envisioned, and give him an opportunity to prove himself worthy of Petro’s faith.

Most of all, though, I wanted to see if the story’s primary antagonist bit it in the end. I honestly had no idea whether or not he was going to die until I actually got to the sentence that decided it. When I penned the book's last sentence a few minutes later, I was so pumped up and excited—despite the fact that it was two in the morning and I'd been working since nine a.m.—that I couldn’t calm down for hours after. I finally was able to shut my eyes at six, to grab three hours of sleep.

Now that I’m reading the book a once-over before sending it off, I’m really pleased, and a little bit surprised, how exciting it all is. It’s lively, and funny, and action-packed in the parts where it’s needed. I’d been a little worried because The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was a whirlwind of swashbuckling, pirate fights, enemy armadas, and hammy acting, and I thought A Traveler to Nascenza might come off a little slow after that. It’s true that the death toll is three thousand, two hundred, and seventeen less than The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. But there’s intrigue, fireworks, teenaged infatuation, underaged drinking, an adolescent erection, and a whole page of two teenaged boys making nut jokes. How could it be anything other than thrilling?

Arf!

I’m trying to squeeze out the last couple of chapters on A Traveler to Nascenza. Taking quick breaks to do things other than writing, I tell myself, gives me some time to knit loose ends together in my head before I commit them to paper. Yesterday, during a troublesome spot, I spent a little more time in the kitchen than I did on my laptop.

First I chopped tomatoes and basil from the garden and mixed them with a touch of oil and garlic so I could chill them and serve it as a bruschetta for dinner. Then I made some yogurt brownies. And finally, because I had the ingredients and the nerve, I made dog treats, intending them for Clark and Jeffrey’s dog, Stella. Because no matter how mean Mike and Brian are about the shirts I wear, their dog is always sweet to me.

The dog biscuits involved mixing peanut butter in hot chicken stock to break it down, then adding egg and molasses and cooking oil, then stirring in cornmeal and whole wheat flour. When it was somewhat cohesive, I rolled the dough out into a log that I cut into slices, and then halved each slice before putting the bite-sized nuggets on a cookie sheet for baking. The scent of peanut butter and chicken stock baking was, oddly enough, not reminiscent of a chicken satay or anything savory. Mostly it was pretty stanky, so I was grateful when the little morsels had been reduced to little cookies and had cooled, so I could seal them away in a plastic bag to take down to Clark and Jeffrey later.

When the Mont came home from school, I was back to work. “Hi honey,” I called out from the sofa in the den, where I was writing.

“What have you been doing?” he asked, putting down his briefcase. “Mmm. Brownies,” he said, after seeing the pan sitting on the oven. “What are these chocolate things?”

“Chocolate things?” I asked, a little muzzy-headed from making fiction.

“These.” He walked toward the den with the bag in his hand.

“They’re not chocolate,” I said.

“What are they?”

“Well, smell them,” I suggested. He opened up the bag and inhaled. Not finding anything out of the ordinary, he stuck his hand inside and, before I could stop him, popped one in his mouth and began chewing. My jaw dropped open. Barely able to contain my laughter, I said, “They’re dog biscuits.”

Oh, the look on his face. There are too few moments in life as fully satisfactory as the few seconds immediately following my announcement. I haven’t laughed so much since the Mont was mistaken for my father.

Later in the evening, when I burst into a spontaneous fit of laughter remembering it, he glared at me from the sofa. “It wasn’t as if you put dog food in them,” he complained.

He didn’t have a retort when I pointed out the obvious, however. “But you didn’t know that!”

That Shirt

The best part of a recession—and I know some of you are feeling me out there—is the sales. Desperate retailers plus desperately trying to move stock equals some really good buys, when one stumbles upon them. It was last week, when the Mont and I were window shopping our way around one of those department stores that mysteriously seems to hang on for month after month despite never having any actual customers, that we happened upon a cluster of sales racks of designer clothing that had been steeply discounted. I mean, the original prices had already been cut in half, and the store was inviting us to remove an additional eighty-five percent or more.

Unfortunately, it was also the kind of store that stocked very little in my spindly size. From the small section of the rack I plucked a shirt that normally for which I’d never fork over legal tender. In my head I rapidly did some calculations, then double-checked them on my phone’s calculator. “What do you think of this one?” I asked the Mont. “It’s a ninety-dollar Perry Ellis shirt. Now it’s six dollars.” Even my depressed wallet could afford six dollars.

He looked up, then startled back. “AIEE!” he shrieked.

I blinked a few times. Sure, the shirt was a little . . . well . . . loud, with its busy pattern of cornflower blue poppies on a bright white cotton background. Yes, it was the kind of obnoxious shirt one ordinarily sees on party boys out for a night of shots and tapas. But I liked it. “I’m buying it,” I told him, ignoring his eye-rolling.

Once home, I tried the shirt on with some jeans, and rather liked the effect. It suited me. I liked the inner lining, and the way it was made. I walked downstairs and stood in front of the Mont in the den. “How’s it look?” I asked.

He glanced up from his computer and flinched away. “Good god!” he yelled. “Don’t do that to me!”

“Oh, come on,” I chided. “It’s not that bad. Is it?”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner and said, with the utmost of sincerity, “No, it will be fine. Once you have a sweater over it.”

Butt-wipe.

Saturday night, feeling feisty, I announced, “I am wearing the shirt.”

“You’re not really,” said the Mont.

“Yes. I am.”

“Airplanes will mistake you for a landing strip.”

“I’m wearing it!”

I must have sounded determined, because he shrugged in that sort of it’s your funeral way and let me go change. I put on the shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. It fit well. It didn’t billow around the waist, the way so many slim-fitting shirts tend to. I still liked it. It was in that kind of proud and feisty mood that a couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Clark and Jeffrey’s house down the street, to pick them up before we went to the bar. “Good evening, Clark and Jeffrey, people to whom I am speaking this evening,” I said.

There was a moment of silence as they both settled in. Then Clark said, “Oh, are you not talking to the Mont because he said something about you wearing his mother’s blouse?”

The whole, long evening was like that. My so-called friends had the bar’s owner come over and ask me if I’d like him to find a tablecloth to match my shirt, and enlisted the karaoke mistress to call me to the microphone using my drag-name-if-I-had-a-drag-name. (If you must know, it’s Pansy Pots. Because once we were driving by a garden center that had a sign advertising Pansy Pots 3 for $5, and I said, “You know, that would make a great drag name.”) By the end of the night, even my friend ‘Drew’s partner, Stee, was in on the joke. When the Mont went up to the mic and ended up soloing “Something Stupid,” on which we normally duet, I complained loud and long that ordinarily he asked me to sing with him.

“Maybe it’s the shirt,” said Stee, sounding apologetic.

I don’t care. I like the shirt. It was six dollars. Maybe there was a reason it was discounted so steeply. I’m wearing it, dammit. I'M WEARING IT ALL THE TIME.

This day cannot pass unnoticed...

Happy second birthday, Fred!