Monster Media 1994 #2/Monster Media No. 2 (Monster Media)(1994).ISO/magazine/rubyv33.zip/RUBY33-7

Text File | 1994-05-19 | 10KB | 177 lines

Copyright 1994(c)

                           THE WRITER
                         By Del Freeman

     "I'm a drunk," the man had said. "That's what I do -- I
drink."
     Incongruous as the AA setting had been for the remark, he'd
thought it a telling lead. and the Florida Press Association had
agreed; given him an award for the story.
     That had been back when the world was sane, so long ago he
almost didn't remember. Today he might write it likening it to his
own situation. 'I'm a writer, ... I drink.'
     Visiting the neighborhood tavern had become second nature,
much like the constant need to replenish the vegetable bin. He set
his paper bag with its pound and a half of fresh tomatoes on the
counter and removed one, plunking it down in payment for a cold,
frothy draft beer.
     The tavern was conveniently situate between his garage
apartment on Main Highway and the vegetable stand along what had
once been the heavily traveled U.S. 1.
     Solly ambled over to collect the tomato, replacing it with a
frosty mug. "How goes the research son?" he asked with a broad
wink.
     Murphy studied the old man's grin, deciding it was rightfully
placed. Ten months after his arrival in the ruin of Miami's Coconut
Grove, he had little more material than he'd acquired in his first
week. Oh, there was plenty of rubble and sad hokum for front page
stories, but nothing that hadn't been written and re-written to a
surfeit. He wondered exactly what he had hoped for back then, in
his eager exuberance to write the ultimate story of death and
destruction. Whatever it was, it had never materialized, and
neither had the novel. He grinned back at Solly, shrugging in
response.
     "Hell, Solly,... beats me," he said. "Been so long, I forgot."
     He hadn't forgotten at all, and they both knew it. He had just
never found the angle. Two weeks after his arrival, Solly had
tipped him to the garage apartment -- its Cuban owner busily
packing and moving on. The owner was happy to have a tenant on the
premises in return for watching the property. "Watch it until it
sinks," the owner had said sardonically, "and hope you don't go
with it."
     He could long ago have moved into the Cuban's spacious, vacant
main house fronting Biscayne Bay, but it hadn't seemed worth the
effort. There was little to see but water, and he had a fine view
of that from his upstairs window, with the added benefit of a
breeze. He remembered his grandmother's tales of growing up
without air conditioning, and his own wonder that anyone could
survive the heat of Florida without mechanical cooling. Oh, to have
a palm fan concession in South Florida today, he thought. Or a
bicycle shop. The latter common mode of transportation had
coccooned neighborhoods as nothing could.
     The good thing about life, if anything was good, was that
society had merely had to re-learn what it already knew. If
electric energy was ever re-established, perhaps they'd all be
smarter. In the meantime, manual typewriters and cold type produced
what written news there was; those with generators occasionally
turned them on and made novelties such as ice cubes. More often,
they relied on large blocks of ice from the ice houses who could
afford to maintain refrigeration, and charged accordingly.
     "Same old, same old, huh?" asked Solly, conversationally.
     "Pretty much," Murphy agreed.
     "Well, there was always a lot of grumbling about that demon
progress, and how we all ought to slow down. I reckon nature's done
that for us," Solly observed, and wandered away to serve another
customer.
     Nature, indeed, Murphy thought. A brief three years after the
devastation that was Hurricane Andrew had leveled the Southern tip
of Florida, the holes had begun to open up. Great chunks of the
most profitable Florida real estate were swallowed up overnight,
commanding little attention from the populous of a U.S. where
earthquakes and mudslides were wreaking the same havoc in
California, and floods were devastating the mid-west. Remote areas
had completely lost touch with the rest of the United States, and
every day some antiquated publication, produced on the most rustic
equipment, blared a headline about finding another settlement of
survivors who had banded together in order to live.
     "Ah well, at least the Cubans are gone," Solly was observing
to a crony at the corner of the bar.
     Gone they were, too, Murphy thought. In all of the Southern
tip of Florida you could find only a handful of Cuban entrepreneurs
who seemed the only ones capable of tilling the coral rock soil to
grow and barter the vegetables that were now the mainstay of life,
or who possessed the skill to build a walkway; fix a bicycle wheel;
cook and serve a meal that sustained residents for a nominal
barter.
     An entire way of life had disappeared. A whole chunk of what
remained of society was forced to retreat to the past. Slowly,
those who remembered better times died off, and writing about what
once was became a surreal pastime, more myth than reality.
     So, Murphy wrote those stories and lolled about with the rest
of the primitives, waiting for something pulitzer to tap him on the
shoulder, even if such prizes were as gone with the wind as the
glittering neon that once proclaimed CocoWalk in the Grove.
     Murphy's musing carried him through the first draft, and he
decided on an unusual second. Hotter than whatchaname out there,
today, and a fella's got to have some relief, he told himself.
     "Hey, Solly! One more for the road, please," he called,
digging in his bag for another tomato.
     Solly served it with raised eyebrows. "You'll be riding home
in the dark if you hang around much longer, you know," he reminded.
You'd think somebody would clear the debris that still littered
what was left of the streets, but the whole generation seemed to
have lost interest in improving things, and merely contented
themselves with day-to-day survival.
     "I've been meaning to sketch the crater at the end of the
street, anyway," Murphy said, philosophically. It was possible to
produce a newspaper with cold type, but photographs were out of the
question. A reporter who could illustrate his stories with artwork
could name his own price in items for barter. He had no idea where
the paper came by the primitive form of pay, and didn't care so
long as the horse-drawn supply wagon made the trek between
Jacksonville and South Florida every week.
     Murphy's thoughts turned inward over his second beer. Maybe
he'd head North, he thought. Soon it would be cooler there, at
least. Solly's conversation with the other customer turned to "The
Sinking," which is how remaining residents referred to the
demolition of their city and their lives. He listened with half an
ear until Solly came to the part about the maiden.
     "What?" he asked. "Solly, you been holding out on me?"
     "Nah," said Solly. "I told you about it."
     But Murphy had no recollection of the tale; suspected Solly
did this on purpose -- giving him bits and pieces from time to time
--just enough to keep him writing and turning out something a bit
new and different. He'd long suspected that the vegetables were
merely dressing; that Solly kept the doors open only for the
company they occasionally lured.
      Murphy listened as Solly described in great detail the
appearance of the woman. Her hair had been auburn and quite long,
he said. He'd seen it moving lightly against her neck, blown by
the ocean breeze as she'd crossed the cobbled street. Red neon
beckoned her to Planet Hollywood, the night spot which had just
opened and was playing host to Hollywood's luminatti.
     She wore stiletto heels, Solly said, and a mini-skirt. All
legs and hair, with lots of curves in between. She might have been
Stallone's sweet thing. She might not. It didn't matter, because
the first hole ate her, Solly said.
     After a time, shock dulled, but at that moment -- the first
of the destruction -- Solly had been shocked.
     Of course, the holes ate it all. What had been an entire block
of bustling shi-shi businesses had fallen into the earth. Only
Solly, and most of his tavern, had survived. Nobody knew how the
survivors had been selected. Every angle, every story, every
treatment had been tried since to describe it. Except the virgin
to the volcano. Murphy listened harder.
     Later, as he wended his way homeward past the chunks of brick
and rubble that lined the dark streets, pushing his bicycle with
the bag of tomatoes tied to the handlebars, Murphy thought he'd
found his next story. He didn't know if it had any validity --
maybe the virgin hadn't been one at all and maybe none of it
mattered. Nothing he wrote would be preserved, nor did it deserve
to be. The point, he mused, was not to write the great American
definitive story of the end of the world, as he had once thought.
The point was merely to occupy one's time. To survive. To get the
next bag of tomatoes and the next cold draft at Solly's.
     Whatever the world had become, Murphy Brown Hale, (named, his
mother had said long ago, after some television character from the
early 1990's), was a writer. It didn't matter whether there were
readers left.
     As he formed the specious story in his mind, fingers itching
to pound it out on his manual typewriter, Murphy thought about
Solly's tavern -- last vestige of a civilized society. "Having It,"
was a strange name for a tavern, he'd told Murphy on his first
visit.
     "Yep, I reckon so," Murphy agreed. "See, it used to say
"Having It All," but the All fell into the hole."
     So it had, he'd written in his first story. He'd accompanied
it with a sketch of the outside of Murphy's tavern, the cracked
sign barely retaining the "t", and then dropping off into
nothingness.
     Faint moonlight outlined the gabled roof of his garage
apartment and he lifted the bicycle, readying to take it upstairs
for the night, again mentally forming the words which would tell
the story of the sacrificial maiden.
     "I'm a writer," he muttered to himself, as he lugged the
bicycle up the stairs. "That's what I do -- I write."
                               END