Bigfoot

(As I’m transferring material over from the old configuration of the site to the new one, I’ll be reprinting a number of stories and articles. “Bigfoot” was written while studying at Johns Hopkins. My spouse at the time and I didn’t have a TV and spent a lot of time in the evening reading aloud to each other. This story owes a great deal to a few weeks spent with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the products of Mark Twain, whose works I love.)

Bigfoot twists around in the poolside lounge chair and admires her hairy ankle and the gold choker masquerading as an anklet there. The California sun feels hot and heavy on her shoulders. She thinks of Nair. What would light feel like on those shoulders where long coarse hair has always kept the sun’s touch away? Would the skin sear and blister? Maybe she’d try shaving a small patch; she could buy some sun block at the K-Mart.

“Tell me again how you came here,” the reporter says.

“Hopped a bus, honey. Wrapped myself in an old blanket and pretended to be ill. They wouldn’t have stopped for no bearded lady any other way.”

The reporter nods. She’s a hardened professional, but Bigfoot’s beard startled her the first time she saw it. It must be four feet long and Bigfoot’s braided it, woven in bubblegum charms, and tied it off with golden ribbons. It lies on her chest like a pet python.

The reporter’s not entirely happy. Her editor sent her to cover Bigfoot, promised a two page spread if the article was juicy enough. But it’s not. Bigfoot doesn’t have any scandals in her background, no rendezvous with John F. Kennedy, no secret love triangle with Liz and Dick, no unborn illegitimate children, no meetings in motel rooms with fundamentalist preachers, and no Hustler centerfold (although there have been offers). All the skeletons in her closet are plain unvarnished bones.

It’s not that she’s not colorful. But she’s too darn hard to contain in a single line. She’s larger than life and much bigger than a breadbox. Every time the reporter tries to think of a lead, here comes Bigfoot, all knees and elbows, bending the sentence out of whack and choking it up with that hair of hers.

Bigfoot grins as the reporter pauses and takes a sip of her pina colada.

“This house, this pool,” the reporter says, waving an arm clothed in creamy linen at the short cropped green grass, the white tiles, the three stories and five and a half baths. “How did you get all this?”

“This stuff? Oh, here and there. I always wanted a place like this one. You folks have it so easy here. No idea what the woods are like? They’re a jungle, a life that’s short, nasty and full of brutality. Always looking for something to eat, mushrooms, tree bark, small furry animals, you know. And you can’t light a fire because they’ll see you.”

“Who will see you?”

“The park rangers. They don’t approve of missing links. They say we bring down the overall tone of the park. I always tell them, look around, it’s not us that pitched these non-biodegradable styrofoam cups and beer cans all over the place. If you’re looking for someone who brings down the general tone of the park, I say, you’re not looking at the right species.”

“What are your plans for the future?”

“I’m doing Carson this week and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ the next. I’m going to give that Vanna woman a run for the money. Once they see me in an evening gown, she won’t have a chance. Why, she doesn’t have any more hair than one of those Barbie dolls. Just on her head, and even then not in all the right places.”

“Do you have any name other than Bigfoot?” the reporter asks, scratching away on her pad. She’s pretty hairless herself, but appealing in a skinny sort of way.

“You asking me for my name on a first date, honey?” Bigfoot says, and gives her a bawdy stare. The reporter flushes, and Bigfoot roars with laughter, then apologizes.

“Sorry, I forgot how you folks are.”

The reporter, whose name is Marjorie, goes out with Bigfoot to a bar. They drink 35 life insurance salesmen under the table, and then Bigfoot stands on top of the bar counter and starts to shout:

“Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! I’ve wrassled woolly mammoths left over from the ice age and tamed them until they gave down sixteen hundred gallons of mammoth milk! I’ve hollowed out giant redwood stumps with my teeth to use as a cradle for my daughter, and spit out the splinters to make a rocking chair! I’ve walked over mountains taller than a man could think and I’ve swum seas deeper than sorrow! Whoop! Whoop! I can out-drink, out-boast and out- love any person in this bar, and I’ve got the scars to prove it!”

The bartender tries to wrestle Bigfoot to the floor, but she holds him off with one hairy knuckled hand and keeps on shouting:

“Whoop! Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! I sing so loud that the birds give up and go south for the winter and then don’t come back for three years! I can walk so light you’d swear I was never going to get there and I can stamp so heavy you’d think I was never going to leave! I spin my clothes out of things so fine you can’t see them, flea’s wings and the tears of water and the shadows of fog and I’m so splendid in those clothes that the autumn leaves fall right off the trees when they see me! Step up and try to match me, folks! I’m Bigfoot!”

“You’re embarassing me,” the reporter says.

After the bartender succeeds in throwing the two of them out, Bigfoot stands on the sidewalk and screams and rants and hoots and hollers.

“You’re acting inappropriately,” Marjorie says this time and Bigfoot says, “So what?”

Marjorie wakes up in Bigfoot’s bed and doesn’t really quite know how she got there.

But the warm bed is replete with the fragrance of leaves and warm summer grass. Bigfoot’s hair coils around her, a little scratchy, and the beard lies over her breasts as though the snake had fallen asleep.

After Bigfoot’s made her first few media appearances, things start arriving for her at the house. White roses and daffodils, Godiva chocolates and a couple of diamond rings. She ties the rings into her beard and shows Marjorie how to sprinkle sugar on the roses and eat their petals.

But there’s too many roses for two women to eat. They fill the house, and stick out the windows, lie like snowdrifts on the lawn. News reports come in.

Ten thousand women have thrown away their Epiladies and stopped shaving their legs in honor of Bigfoot. Vanna White lets her armpit hair grow and the razor industry’s up in arms over this dangerous trend. Ten thousand other women shave their heads to protest Bigfoot’s dangerous example. The politics of letting one’s body hair grow is discussed on Oprah.

A man with short gray hair says Bigfoot is a crime against nature.

“What do you mean by that?” Oprah asks.

“She’s neither man nor beast,” he says.

“He’s got that right,” Bigfoot tells Marjorie, and pushes the power button. The light on the screen, Oprah’s face, the man’s face, the commercials for depilatories and douches and feminine deodorant all shrink into a dot of brightness which disappears.

More jewels arrive, and Bigfoot throws them into the pool so she can watch them sparkle.

Marjorie is of a divided opinion on all the controversy. She goes into the bathroom, takes out a Lady Schick disposable razor and shaves her right leg and armpit. As long as she’s at it, she trims the pubic hair on her right side, tweezes her right eyebrow and evens up her bangs a little. She stands in front of the mirror naked and looks at herself. It doesn’t seem to her as though there’s a lot of difference. But she knows in two days there’s going to be a lot of uncomfortable, itchy, red pimpled stubble.

Bigfoot howls with laughter when she sees her.

“Poor little thing,” she gasps. “You look like you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.”

Marjorie gets irritated. “You don’t need to feel so superior,” she shouts. “There’s pros and cons. Don’t think I didn’t notice the other day when you got your beard stuck in your zipper! Or when you spilled spaghetti sauce all over it! You come here from the wilderness and think you’ve got the solutions to everybody’s problems!”

Bigfoot smiles.

Marjorie continues. “Well, you don’t, Miss Neo-Thoreau! It’s not that simple!” Her face is red, and her throat is open and loud and screaming out the words like she never has before in her entire life. Bigfoot smiles even more as Marjorie screams and rants, hoots and hollers.

Marjorie can’t stand it any longer. “What are you smiling at?” she yells.

“You’re acting inappropriately.”

That night, the sex is the best they’ve ever had, inappropriate or not, and Marjorie learns to do some whooping of her own. In the morning, she opens her eyes and sees Bigfoot packing.

“Where are you going?’ she asks.

“Going to do some more traveling, hon. This is my vacation, after all. I got mountains to climb, clouds to catch, hearts to set aflame.”

She slips out the door. After a few minutes, Marjorie hears her start to whoop as she goes down the street.

“Whoop! I’m Bigfoot! You’ll never forget me and you won’t ever want to! My fur’s so fine that minks weep with envy and I smell so good I make roses blush. I know five hundred and thirty ways of making love standing up and I’ve forgotten more ways of doing it sitting down than you’ll ever know! Whoop! I’m Bigfoot!”

(originally appeared in 13th Moon)

One Response

Jesus Christ says:

June 18, 2012 at 3:13 am

“Bigfoot Is Real”
http://diannagraveman.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/an-invitation-to-a-bigfoot-adventure#comment-1119

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Falling

January 9, 2011

More free fiction, this time a piece that originally appeared in Cream City Review, in an issue guest-edited by Frances Sherwood.

When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.

My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.

I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.

My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.

“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.

My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.

My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.

“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”

Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.

I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.

I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.

I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.

I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.

A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.

Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.

In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.

We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.

I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.

My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.

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Do Writers Need to Blog? No.

September 26, 2013

A friend once said, "It's odd, the harder I work, the luckier I get." And it's true. But that work is perhaps better put into writing than blogging about writing.

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey.

Let me repeat that. Hooey.

You do not need to have a blog. You do need to have a website that lists your publications and provides a way to contact you, so people can track you down if they want to. That’s it. The world is full of blogs with writing advice from people with only a few publications under their belt. Sometimes they give good advice, sometimes they don’t. It’s not ordained that you must contribute your quota of “avoid adverbs!” to the pool.

What else do you really need? You need to be writing steadily and sending stuff out.

Yes, if you have 50K Twitter followers, you may be more desirable in an editor’s eyes. But the time and effort you would need to spend growing that Twitter following from scratch would be better spent writing. You are not going to gain swarms of followers unless you are putting some effort into entertaining and informing them.

If blogging is going to be a chore for you, then don’t do it. Or engage in a very simple form of blogging: post a brief excerpt of what you wrote that day (or week, or whatever). You’ll find people are just as satisfied with an interesting story chunk as that preachy bit about not piling adjectives together. And, when the piece is published, that announcement gives you something else to put on the blog.

John Scalzi gets mentioned as a blogging success story. What doesn’t get mentioned is that he put an entire book up a bit at a time, and gained much of his following that way. Scalzi does have the sort of web presence that would make a publisher lick their chops. That sort of web presence doesn’t come easily.

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