Twanker preferred to think of himself as a preference hedonist, the kind of guy who looked at his options and chose the paths that made him happiest. Tonight, that meant a few drinks at Bruno’s Supper Club, just off the playa, two barstools down from Psychic Mike. The room reeked of Mike’s cigar-soaked leather vest and Bruno’s famous ravioli, wafting in from the nearby restaurant. At the bar, Bruno was refilling Miller Genuine Draft from the tap and pouring cheap vodka over ice for Mike.

“…bashes his car into a boulder, like that …” Mike was in the middle of a story. Bruno was paying no attention. Neon lights reflected in mirror behind the bar, slathered with Republican bullshit stickers. NoBama. And “You can keep your hope and change. I’ll keep my money.”

Dummy, thought the writer of this story to herself as she realized that she recently – just last week in fact — wrote a story in which a bar figured prominently. Bar as leitmotif, what the fuck is that about? Perhaps she finds that her own bar, by which she actually means bars but who’s parsing actualities, perhaps she finds in her places of drink a certain spirituality, affiliation, belonging. Religious epiphanies in each glass of wine, the blood of any Christ you could imagine. Those who pour are the pastors, the shepherd, the kind leaders of lost flock.

Over time, she’d written about bars in Reno and Santiago and London and Baraboo, Wisconsin, where she’d grown up. She’d written a column once about a bar in Evanston, Wyoming, where she met ranchers, a few, along with many drillers of oil and one trucker who listened to NPR as he hauled potatoes across the nation. Believing that one should conform to the drinking habits of the community, she’d consumed Bud Lites well into the night, even paying for a few.

The bar had boasted a shot dispenser from a chilled bottle of that stuff her kids drank. Jagermeister. Nasty licorice syrup. She’s surprised that a friend can fill in the word for her but that’s what friends are for, especially writer friends, and that was what was on tap and cold. But now it was time to return to the story, to her own inner preference hedonist, Twanker, at a bar in Gerlach. If she had been born with a penis, it’s not unthinkable that she might have turned out a bit like Twanker, an outsider in a desert town of misfits. Maximizing the happiness he experienced alone determining what would be good for him.

“…headfirst, into the abyss..” Psychic Mike was talking to Twanker now and Twanker noticed a purple aura emanating from his shaved head and the dry tats on his lean arms. “You can see the structure he built along Dooby Lane.”

“With rocks,” Twanker added, “he used some of them flat slabs of Permian marine limestone.” The black rocks. A mystic potency. Twanker had piled them around his cottage on Sunset Boulevard. His place was across from the Senior Center. Twanker thought the rocks looked nice amidst the Russian thistle a.k.a. tumbleweed, sage, rabbit brush. He painted words on the rocks, one word per rock, constructing poems like folks did with that whatnot. That you know magnetic poetry stuff you saw stuck to frigs in the 1990s.

“Hardbound!” Mike was shouting, “Hell to the yeah!”

Time for another aside and the acknowledgement that now the author was working in everything she’d wanted to use in a piece of writing from leitmotif, which she come upon in a stupid column by Richard Cohen, syndicated asshole, and the carefree slogan posted to Facebook by Savage Jen. What she hadn’t yet worked in was the rest of the writing prompt and the explanation that preference hedonism differs from other forms of hedonism by rejecting common, rigid definitions of pleasure and pain. She’d plagiarized that last bit from some grad student’s philosophy blog. She could change it later. If it even mattered.

“Copy that,” Twanker muttered, scratching his crotch and wondering if what he said was really in his own voice or if the writer had imposed awkward language down his throat like a swollen used tampon.

Of course, thought the writer, we don’t want him to catch on to the design of this – or should I say the lack of design. Or do we, by which I mean “I” as in I am in singular control of these words. Did someone hang the Testamento geométrico on a clothesline or what? (Yes, she had wanted to work in a reference to Roberto Bolano. Be impressed please!)
At any rate, the brilliance of words, a story, a book, whether mathematics or high literature or a Tweet – that which we value condensed to 140 characters or worse yet, mere ink on paper, glued or sewn, desiccating in the arid atmosphere, browned by sunshine, shat on by birds, pages blowing wildly about in the afternoon zephyr. Reduction’s a physical process after all.

Great is a construction of seem, the only emperor was never wearing any clothes. Damn, thought Twanker, pulling a cocktail napkin from a black plastic bin next to hunks of lemon and a few stale olives. I’m being profound, fucking deep as shit, swimming in meaning, drowning in denotation. I may be other than I thought I was. What if I didn’t drop out of high school. What if I was actually the angsty professor who drops out of society and goes to live in the desert. You can do more with me. He raised his hand over his head and looked up. “Make me better than this! I know I can handle it, my character will be richer, better, more intriguing. Your work will provoke thought and no one will notice that you write about skanky bars in shit places. You will earn respect. I can help. Psychic Mike nodded. Yeah, that’s it. You let her know. Put in a word for me.

Expectations? The writer didn’t have many for Twanker and Psychic Mike. Maybe they could fall in love. Or, in another design, they could be drug lords or terrorists on the run. She’d never written a chase scene before. She could imagine villains breaking land speed records on the playa. Good place for it, miles and miles and mile and miles and mile.

Nah. Nothing usable tonight, she thought, and walked away from the screen without giving this file a name.

A waitress turned the lights on loud and large, right around midnight. It was a weeknight and no reason to stay open late in Gerlach, not for these two drunks.

Twanker slid from the barstool and tottered to the door. Psychic Mike, still glowing purple, put his hand on Twanker’s shoulder to steady himself and quoted Dickens:

“I took his hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting.”

Deidre Pike
Carter House
22 Jan. 2014

The prompt was a line that Jennifer brought as a headline fix (by Lost Coast Outpost editor Hank Sims): “Twanker bashes dummy over the head with a hardbound copy of Great Expectations”