Last Exit

We look at the menu, but it’s only a formality.  We already know what we’re up against:  a Siren of a thing this restaurant calls ‘Love Boat,’ which is a collection of sushi-and-sashimi-for-two the three of us have never been able to resist—and so, we’re not about to now.

We chat, just like old times, and the two of you occasionally squabble.  Normal for siblings, I think.  And I’m quietly thankful for the familiarity—which still has the nice ring of ‘family,’ even if the rip tide of ‘concept’ is moving steadily, irrevocably, out to sea.  I feel myself drifting with it, but trying to hold fast to pylons for the duration.

‘Love Boat’ finally arrives, and we dig in.  Eager mouths attach to this love-in-a-boat, and the earlier testiness disappears from the table.  My two babies are now just taking on fuel against a cold February night.  I love their greediness, which is a father’s delight to be able to satisfy.

But my delight is on a clock, and that clock has now ticked out.

We conclude with Green Tea and Red Bean ice cream:  exotica beyond mere flavors or colors in this frigid time of year.  I ask for the check, lay down a cool hundred—my last for the privilege of a ‘Love Boat’—and we stand up to leave.

“You’re going straight home?” my little guy asks.  I lie, tell him “yes.”  We walk two blocks to their front gate, and his sister, my daughter, says “g’nite.”  He knows, however, that an entrance to the park is just another block away and insists on walking me to the subway stop.  It’s a park, he knows, in which one can easily lose oneself on a winter’s night—a park asleep, a park apart, a park of no necessary exit.  There was a time, he knows, when I walked–sometimes slept–there late at night, quite apart, looking perhaps for a last, fast exit.

We walk to the subway stop.  He waits at the top, I imagine, until he’s heard “goodnight” from me and a click from the turnstile—until he knows I’m going home.

“I’ll call you,” is the last thing I hear from him, and I know he means it.  This is his watch, and he’ll want to verify that I’ve gone nowhere else, not to any last exit, nowhere but home—at least tonight.

In the Animal Kingdom

(a Thanksgiving story)

“Mammalian life is social and relational.  What defines the mammalian class, physiologically, is … the possession of a portion of the brain known as the limbic system, which allows us to do what other animals cannot:  read the interior states of others of our kind.  To survive, we need to know our own inner state and those of others, quickly, at a glance, deeply.”  From “Programming the Post-human,” by Ellen Ullman.

I sit here now as I sat here then.  He’s not here now; he wasn’t here then.  The only difference between now and then—fifteen years ago—is that I know the difference.

Then?  Then, I had a child’s imagination, a child’s belief that all things were possible—even the impossible—perhaps because I had no knowledge of im.  Im is a prefix that comes with age, with experience, with rejection and failure.  Slowly.  More quickly if you have nothing worth rejecting.  Then, im comes at you without mercy.  And very quickly, you can no longer even see the word “possible” without its attendant im.

But that was fifteen years ago—when I was a mere child—with a child’s imagination, a child’s belief, and a child’s still imperfect vision.  None of which could really distinguish between im and him.  And him was what I’d been anticipating for almost a whole year.

Today, the greatest of all days on the American calendar, is Thanksgiving—now as then.  No other holiday—he’d said it himself many times—can compare.  It’s the day on which we all come home, wherever home may be.  Sometimes, that home is just a heartbeat.  But so long as a heart is beating, it yearns for home.  And home is what we come to—on Thanksgiving.

 “What time is Papa coming?” I shout from where I’m sitting next to the front window.

“Six o’clock,” my mother shouts back from the kitchen.

“And if he doesn’t?”  I ask.

“He’ll be here.  We agreed.  And if there’s one thing your father is, it’s punctual.”

To myself, I think:  I know.  It’s the German in him.  He can’t help himself or being punctual—whatever ‘punctual’ means.

“It’s the German in him,” my mother shouts, unprompted.  “He can’t help himself.”

My sister looks at me.  I look back at her.  We’ve both heard the words many times before.  At a quarter to six on a cold and wet November afternoon, there’s little comfort—dry or warm—in hearing this same old harangue about my father and his people.

Her Russia and his Germany—I realize now—were thousands of miles apart and two generations distant.  Nevertheless, the ethnic slurs they exchanged had always begun like swift after-kicks on the hoof of an argument:  a land-grab here, a pogrom there, Gestapo tactics everywhere.  Not to mention any number of other “old Europe” defects that lodged in their genes and coursed through their veins—and so through my sister’s and mine—like slightly flawed diamonds on an otherwise steady stream of pure Doodle Dandy lava.

This was the first Thanksgiving since their separation, which my father liked to call “collateral damage” by way of association with that other undoing in lower Manhattan.  But the real truth of their undoing was another matter altogether.

 “What time is it now, Mama?” I yell out again from my perch where Alice and I sit like a couple of famished baby birds.

“5:57. Any minute now.  Trust me.  No, don’t trust me.  Trust him.”

I put my cheek up against the window and close my eyes tight.  And that’s when I begin to see him . . .

He’s wearing an old, black corduroy coat, which I recognize immediately, and which I’d once seen hanging on a throwaway hanger in the basement.  I asked my mother about it at the time, and she told me it had been my father’s coat from his college days—something he’d picked up at a thrift shop for a couple of bucks, and which he’d too often and too proudly called his “Diogenes coat.”

“So why does he keep it?” I asked.

“I dunno.  Maybe he thinks he’ll need it again one day.  There are many things about your father I don’t understand.”  With that, the conversation ended, and we both promptly forgot about the coat—until now.

As he comes up the street, I look more closely at this coat.  It’s ragged, worn gray in spots where it should be black, the collar too wide, the sleeves too short.

As he moves closer, I notice he’s carrying a bag—a dark, brown plastic bag.  I know my father and I know that bag.  The contents of a dark brown plastic bag can be only one thing.  This is, after all, Thanksgiving—the greatest feast of the year.

He steps up and rings the bell.  Alice and I run to answer.

When I open the front door, my first impression is that he’s aged.  Maybe it’s the coat, I decide.  That, or something about his hair.  My father had always been careful about his hair, especially in times of economic recession. “Good times might come and go,” he’d chuckle.  “But my hairline takes the longer view and stays the course,” he’d invariably add with a flair for the obvious.  This time, however, I’m so sure that his coat—or his hairline, for that matter—are holding fast to any course whatsoever.

It’s merely a first impression.  We fling the door open, and he scoops us both up while managing very carefully, I notice, to keep the contents of the brown plastic bag out of harm’s way.

He brings the three of us inside—me, Alice and the bag—to greet my mother, who comes out of the kitchen bearing a dish towel like a Jersey barrier.  This isn’t their first meeting since the separation.  But this is their first on a significant holiday.  In other words, this is their first contractual meeting.

My mother looks down at the bag.  “Happy Thanksgiving,” she says in a guarded monotone.

“Ditto,” my father offers in return.  (My father has always believed in brains over brawn.  And, whenever possible, he uses Latin to prove it.)  He quickly diverts his glance from my mother to the dining table, puts both Alice and me down before seating himself, then holds the bag up to her as if surrendering a weapon.

“It looks fabulous!  Here,” he says.  “The red’s for the turkey.  The white is for everything that comes up between now and the delectation of that turkey.”

“We’re having goose,” my mother says.

“Ah,” my father says, not even trying to conceal the fact of his pleasure.  “Goose!  We haven’t had goose since our very own first Thanksgiving together.  Before these little munchkins—.” The last of his declaration goes the way of former Thanksgiving goose dinners, unknown to both Alice and me.  “‘Must be a special occasion,” he deadpans—an all-too-familiar smirk forming at the corners of his mouth.

Alice and I look at each other.  We’ve just spent a whole week preparing for such a contingency.  If my father can have his collateral damage—we reasoned—we can have our preëmptive strike.

I harrumph, and my father looks at me.  I indicate with my eyes a sign, taped to the wall directly behind his head.  He turns around and reads.

HUMOR ENJOYS THE SAUCE OF SARCASM ABOUT AS MUCH AS A LIVE TURKEY ENJOYS THE THOUGHT OF ITS STUFFING.

My father turns back and stares at me.  I know his angry stare, and this isn’t it.  Instead, there’s just a hint of appreciation in his eyes—the kind I was once used to seeing whenever Alice or I might say something that struck him as truly amusing.

It’s a look of appreciation that never failed to produce in me the same sensation I’d once felt whenever he’d put his arm around me and call me his guy.  It’s the same sensation I felt whenever I’d performed well at some sport, and would then look in his direction for a reaction.  He wouldn’t shout or rave like other parents.  He’d just give me a firm, quiet thumbs-up.  Whatever I might’ve just accomplished on a given field or court or diamond, however loud the cheers or rants of other kids’ parents, I’d look for that thumb.  When I found it, I always felt that kind of shudder which opens like a gasp, closes like a sigh.

“Goose,” he says, looking at my mother.  “I can hardly wait!”  He then looks at Alice and me and winks.  I wink back, now feeling supremely confident about Alice’s and my first success as peacemakers.

My mother returns to the kitchen.  My father sits down in the Mission Style armchair we inherited as part of their separation agreement—his chair, once, but which he’d given up without a fight.  He runs his hands along the arms of that chair as I’d seen him run his hands many times along my mother’s arms.  Abruptly, he glances away, but only for an instant.  His eyes and thoughts then return once again to us and to the occasion—and, his arms outspread, Alice and I rush in.

“Thanksgiving.  Who amongst you can tell me the story of Squanto and the first Thanksgiving?” he asks with faux ceremony.

“Who between you, you mean,” I correct.  “There are only two of us here.”  He gives me another one of his looks—doubtless piqued by my correction, but awed, too, by this bit of erudition I’m showing off like a pair of shiny new silver spurs.

“Okay, who between you?  And who between you is going to cast the next stone?”

“Fowler says—,” I start in, careful, as he always used to insist, to know and quote my sources accurately.

“Fowler said many things,” he interrupts.  “But Fowler’s dead, and dead men don’t cast stones.  Who between you can tell me something about Squanto?”

I know, of course, because he brought the story to my attention years ago.  Alice is too young to know the answer—or rather, to understand the real question.  He isn’t asking whether one of us knows the story of Squanto and the first Thanksgiving.  No, he’s asking whether either of us remembers how we came to know the story.

I pause.  At this moment, I understand, perhaps for the first time, how important it is to my father to be remembered and appreciated—as a father, as a provider, as a teacher—at least by his own children.

For months now, he’s been on the outside looking in.  Our contact has been almost exclusively by telephone.  He’s been out there somewhere, at a distance, and growing more distant and detached by the day.  But he still has an urgent need to instruct.  He still wants to believe that his accumulated knowledge of the way things work, however skewed, is of some value—if only to us.  He still wants to believe that if he can’t directly feed us, clothe us, put a roof over our heads, he can at least give us a leg up on the world in which he, himself, has so badly stumbled.

“Squanto,” I begin, “was an Indian, sold into slavery in Spain.”

My father gives me an encouraging nod.  “That’s him.  He’s the one.”

Now it’s my turn to sigh and stare back at my father.  “Squanto was about hurt and separation and the pain of loneliness.  Squanto was also about forgiveness.  And about more hurt, separation and loneliness.  But also about more forgiveness.  I don’t know whether Squanto was a real person or only a symbol.”

“You mean personification?” my father shoots back—too quickly and recklessly it seems to me.  Yet I can see in his eyes—whatever refinement he needs to supply to my symbol—that he’s immensely pleased with my characterization of Squanto and with my understanding of the subtext of the story.

There’s something I catch in his eyes for the first time, and I wince inwardly as I see it.  On the one hand, I feel the pleasure of my understanding; on the other, I feel a fear of something until now quite unfamiliar.  What I see in my father’s eyes is his own pain—or at least the appearance of pain.

Sure, I know what real pain is, and that it often results in tears.  I’ve seen tears of pain, almost daily, on Alice’s cheeks.  I know the occasional feeling of tears on my own cheeks, though less often now that I’m getting older and am not supposed to cry over every little scratch or unkind word.  I even knew what tears look like on an adult’s cheeks, as I’ve seen many such adult cheeks in the weeks and months since the undoing.  And, of course, I’ve seen tears on my mother’s cheeks since my parents’ separation—though only in the kitchen and only whenever she thought she was alone.  Even then, she’s always seemed to meet my stare from around the corner with an onion in one hand and a knife in the other, as if to dismiss each new eruption of tears as the collusion of a silly vegetable and of a knife’s untimely cutting of it.

I notice that Alice is fidgeting.  But I want to pursue this new knowledge, and decide to try a different tact just to see if it might produce a different reaction.

“I was looking at the moon last night,” I say. “At the man in the moon.”  The leather of his chair creaks as my father leans forward.  “Sometimes, I’d look away.  Then I’d look back again.  Other times, I’d just blink.  And each time I looked again, the man in the moon had a different expression.  Sometimes he looked happy, sometimes, sad—or surprised, or disappointed, or even confused.  The more I looked at his eyes, the more wrinkly they got—mostly, around his left eye.  It looked like he had a black eye, or maybe a scar.  Do you suppose he was ever a boxer?” I finally ask with what I know even now to be a stab at something adults call irony.

My father smiles at this second exhibition of my shiny new spurs.

“Cosmic debris,” he mutters.  “The man in the moon is always boxing with cosmic debris.”

I look at him in complete confusion and think for a moment he might be speaking French—as he sometimes would on holidays.

“It’s the stuff that flies through the night—the stuff you can never anticipate.  That even the man in the moon can’t anticipate, and so he just takes it on the chin.  You can’t plan for it.  You can’t build a defense against it.  It just happens.”

I continue to look at him and wonder when I might finally be allowed to resume.

“Sorry,” he says.  “Just rambling.  Go on.”

“What I wanted to ask,” I start in again, “is why the man in the moon always seems to be changing his expression.”

My father looks at me and begins to squeeze his chin as if it were half a lemon.  What I’d seen earlier in his eyes is now gone as he struggles to find his fatherly voice of authority.  Finally, and entirely out of character, he says “I dunno.  But maybe we can work on a theory.  Whaddya say?” he now asks with an ad hoc Brooklyn accent I know to be pure phony-bologna, and which causes me to shudder.

We are, thankfully, saved by my mother’s announcement of dinner.  “Soup’s on,” she shouts from the kitchen.

Alice and I take our places at the table.  My father, of course, is already sitting, and the three of us now turn our attention to the real reason this is the greatest of all days on the American calendar.

On one side of the table stand various zakuski; on the other, Vorspeisen.  In between, like a happy Maginot Line—and every bit as porous—stand two bottles of French wine, one red and one white, a pepper mill and candelabrum.  We can choose—if little hands care to pass through that line like intrepid soldiers—from the one side: Rotkohl; Sauerkraut; plain, unadorned herring; asparagus wrapped in Westphalian ham; coleslaw with walnuts and raisins; thinly sliced pieces of Kasslerrippchen.  From the other side: sturgeon caviar and salmon roe; smoked pike and whitefish; selyodka swimming in waves of oil and vinegar with little onions like whitecaps; also maslo and pashtet iz seldi; pirozhki; vinegret; and an assortment of other salads.

In my view, the Russians clearly have the advantage.  And yet, in an effort at culinary détente—my mother’s transparent attempt at a Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty—lie side by side and on one plate what she calls Buterbrodi and what my father calls Butterbrötchen.  Her version, with red caviar looking like tiny red balloons; his, with plain butter—each slice standing like a smart little ship with a creamy golden delicacy in its cargo.

Our feast—no word sums it up more succinctly—is saluting from atop white lace covering ecru-colored holiday linen (all of which I now understand, fifteen years later, to have been left over from a previous era in which my parents had conclusively disposed of a sizably disposable income).

My father stands up, reaches for the bottle of white wine, and walks to my mother’s end of the table.

“Du vin blanc, Madame?” he asks like the princely student-waiter he’d once been.

“Mais oui, bien sûr, Monsieur,” my mother aspirates to complete her part in the ceremony.

He fills her glass to three-quarters.

“Spasibo,” she says laconically to an alienated husband who’s once again courting her in the guise of a charming student-waiter.

“Bitte,” he answers, reduced to a single Teutonic sound bite.

He walks back to his end of the table and fills his own glass.  Alice and I also have wine glasses for the occasion, though they cater only to apple juice.

From a standing position, my father raises his glass.  “Zu den Abwesenden,” he announces grandly.  “Za otsyustvyuskikh,” my mother pronounces as if from under the dark clouds of Eastern Europe, and so with far less of my father’s sunny Western disposition.  Then, for our benefit—though we already know both expressions by sound—they pronounce in unison:  “To the absent ones.”

After a few seconds’ pause, and with utensils now busily in motion, my mother continues.  “You’re looking well.  Well, if also a little thin.”

“Qui dort, dîne,” my father mutters.  And then, to the two of us, “As the French would say, ‘He who sleeps, eats.’  In addition to which, I’ve joined—rather, rejoined—the School of Peripatetics,” he announces.

A moment of silence lies sodden before my mother breaks it.  “For the children’s benefit, what exactly is the School of Peripatetics?”

My father settles his knife and fork quietly back down on his dinner plate as his eyes and the corners of his mouth run to take up battle-stations behind a smirk.  He knows that this “for the children’s benefit” is nonsense.  I know that he knows it.  He knows that I—and maybe even my mother—know it.  Only Alice is still too young to share in the general family omniscience.  As amusing as it might be in certain other word games we play, in this instance it is not.  In fact, it has become one of our unhappier routines whenever we find ourselves seated at the dinner table.

I seek to quash it before it can erupt yet again into tension and closed mouths.  I nod at another of Alice’s and my creations on the wall, this one hanging directly over the hutch with an illustration of a very fat, very satisfied cat.  My father looks and reads soundlessly:

SMIRKS ARE UNBECOMING, UNLESS ON A CHESHIRE CAT.

 “Very clever,” my father says—but with nothing like the enthusiasm he’d shown upon reading our first billboard.

In the same instant, he disengages the muscles that hold the smirk, finds a couple of vagrants to replace it with a scowl, and continues in earnest to Alice and me.  “Peripatesis was the brainchild of Socrates, who didn’t like to write.  Its effectiveness was noted by Plato—and to some laughable degree also by Xenophon—who had to walk and write at the same time because Socrates couldn’t be bothered.  This was all later documented and codified by Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle—born a full fifteen years after Socrates’ death—who believed that people absorbed and assimilated—learned, if you will—new information better if they were in motion, even if just walking while talking.”  He leans back again and picks up his knife and fork, a signal to us that he’s ready for summation.  “And so, it was really about walking and talking and doing.  Which is why, to this day—.”

My father’s eyes rather too cavalierly move to my mother’s end of the table—then, however, pull up short as they meet not an appreciative smile, but a yawn.

I know it’s entirely unintentional.  I’m sure he does, too.  And yet, nothing in her arsenal can turn him from gregarious to taciturn more quickly and more soundlessly than a yawn.  His own radar can spot a yawn—particularly one of my mother’s—and all of his defenses go on foolish, full-scale alert.  To his credit, perhaps, even he can appreciate that not everyone shares his enthusiasm for things like “peripatesis.”

I try to get him back on topic.  “Which is why, to this day—?”  I repeat, but he won’t be distracted.  He simply returns to his dinner.  The discussion—his holding forth, really—is now finished, and nothing, not even one of Alice’s and my billboards, can return us to the holiday mood of just seconds earlier.

For once, my father doesn’t say anything disparaging, and my mother doesn’t pretend to excuse herself.  We’re at a standstill.  It feels like old times, and old times don’t feel so good—especially at Thanksgiving.  We chew and swallow, each in his or her own way, each pretending that the happy sounds of holiday cheer still prevail over the near silence of chewing and swallowing.

Alice and I have worked on other billboards.  They all hang there, just waiting like Band-Aids for blisters to break out from some ill-timed word from him, some yawn from her.  But our remaining billboards have already become redundant and, like my father, will find no further employ.  The silence, deeper than any blister, persists.  Alice and I look up at each other from time to time—and for once, no giggle crosses either of our minds.

I glance at my father out of the corner of my eye.  His face looks strained, much older than even just an hour ago, and minus any remnant of the appreciation of my erudition or of Alice’s and my wit.  He, too, simply eats.

Our plates are almost empty.  A single piece of goose remains on the platter.  My father and I are now approaching that point at which we’ll often stage a mock standoff, when both of us are still hungry—or at least pretending to be hungry.  This contest of wills and appetite is one I’ve grown used to, grown fond of, grown up with as a rite of passage and as something my father likes to call “atavistic.”  He has tried to explain it to me on a few occasions, but “atavistic” has, each time, gone the way of “peripatetic.”

It has always been my father’s contention that the reigning male of a pride or pack gets the first spoils of a hunt, can eat his fill, and will only then allow his mate and cubs to gorge themselves on the remaining bits.  This—once again, according to my father—is nature’s law.  He always illustrates it, his own fork poised with slightly menacing tines, over the last bit of meat or other desired edible.  At this same moment, with weapon hovering, he’ll utter the injunction “In the animal kingdom. . .” leaving the rest of the explanation to flutter off like some elliptical butterfly.

However much I might pretend to challenge his claim, he never fails to remind me of the law of the jungle.  If he then grants me this last remainder, it’s only to sit back in his chair with the benign smile of one who has just bestowed a favor upon a subordinate.  This, he knows, is also the law of the jungle—but of the human jungle.

I time my last mouthful to coincide with his last while keeping my fork aloft and with the tines pointed in the direction of the meat platter and of that single drumstick.  My only competitor for the remaining bit ignores my challenge and continues to chew, holding his own spear nonchalantly.  At last he swallows, and I see his eyes focus on the platter that lies before us.  As he raises his arm and spear in its direction, I quickly move my own arm and spear towards the same target-fowl.  Our tines pierce the flesh simultaneously, and I look hard into his face in happy anticipation of the commencement of our ritual.

In the brief seconds that pass between his silent stare and mine, I see his eyes, like those of the man in the moon, pass rapidly through phases and moods to settle finally on the one I’d seen earlier in the afternoon.

I jab at the drumstick so as to prod him on to a challenge.  He doesn’t respond.  Instead, he slowly withdraws his fork.

Please, Papa, no! I think to myself—and yet, for once I hope he can read my mind—“quickly, at a glance, deeply.”  Fight for it!  It’s yours.  You’re still king.  Please, Papa.  Fight me for it!

But he simply retires his fork and aligns it noiselessly alongside his knife.

I now open my eyes—my cheek still pressed hard against the front window, my father nowhere in sight.  The street is dark.  It would now be well past six o’clock.  Alice is on the floor playing with the only set of toys she hasn’t yet broken without hope of replacement:  her ten fingers.  My mother comes out of the kitchen and announces dinner.  I stand up from the couch and take my place opposite hers—where, I imagine, my father would sit if he were here.

My mother lights a single votive candle in the center of the table.  She serves both Alice and me a hefty portion of chicken nuggets onto which she grates a bit of nutmeg.  I notice she’s bought ketchup for the occasion—a holiday treat.  For herself, she’s prepared a single chicken breast and a spoonful of rice, no nutmeg.

She drinks water.  The two of us drink apple juice.  We all drink out of water glasses.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she says as she raises her glass of water and, with her eyes, implores us to do the same.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” we answer in unison as we raise our glasses of apple juice.  I look hard at my mother, but Alice—I notice out of the corner of my eye—doesn’t look up from her plate.

We eat.  The only sound in the room is that of three people eating and swallowing—and digesting the absence of a fourth.  I understand.  Certain buildings have come undone, and families have come undone with them.  The once proud circumstances of a disposable income and of a fine roof over a foursome of heads have changed, and it is only fit that we change with them.  Under this newer roof, and with only my mother’s income to keep it attached, goose is no longer on the menu.  Nuggets are.  But we, at least, have nuggets and a roof.  For that, we can be thankful at Thanksgiving—the one, true celebration.

I stand up and raise my glass.  I look first at Mama, then at Alice.  “Zu den Abwesenden,” I say.  “To the absent ones,” they say in unison—neither of them raising their eyes from the table.

Big news:

Six stories, all of which start within a five-mile radius of 350 5th Avenue, the address of the Empire State Building, the original “Ground Zero.” With this first book of five short stories and one novella, Russell Bittner believes that worlds can be discovered and described in a dewdrop, in a teardrop, in a leaky faucet—and that all that’s required is a good magnifying glass, keen powers of observation, and a feel for how language might be made to form a picture in the reader’s mind. NYC—fugheddaboud Brooklyn—is home to scoundrels and angels, derelicts and daredevils, high flyers, low flyers and every kind of flyer for every kind of service one human being is able to coerce, cheat, beggar or beat out of another. Russell captures that here in the key of C Minor—the key of melancholy.

The novella “Something Special,” which Faraway has been serializing in chapter-long installments throughout August is also now available as a single, complete file, for your reading convenience.  Preview Russell Bittner’s talent in “Something Special,” then click here to purchase the book Stories in the Key of C.  Minor.

Three hours later, a fine dinner tumbling in my belly while a cognac and coffee wait within easy reach, I sit in perfect contentment on a loveseat in front of a blazing fire in a cavernous room of a fine hotel.  This loveseat—like its twin just opposite me—is set at a ninety-degree angle to the fire, and I turn my head to look across the room and out the floor-to-ceiling windows at curtain call upon curtain call of large, billowy snowflakes—and then re-focus on the pitch black emptiness just out of range of the hotel’s lights.  The flames of the fire in front of me, I note with some relish, reflect ghoulishly off the windowpanes—orange specters dancing for my perusal and with no other care in the world but that I should be entertained.

Click here to read the rest.

FARAWAY: What are some common themes that appear in your work?

Love.  Loss.  Loneliness.  The three L’s.  There’s no school I know of that teaches us how to acquire, keep or divest ourselves of any of them.

FARAWAY: How did you become interested in or why did you choose these themes?

Experience—the famous school of experience.

FARAWAY: Many of your stories take place in or around New York.  Can you describe using New York as a setting?

I don’t have any special feeling about NYC.  I’m not particularly fond of Manhattan, but it’s where I went to school, it’s where I worked for many years, it’s where I still sometimes play.  My girl still attends the LaGuardia School of Music & Art, and my boy just finished up at Beacon and is now off to Wheaton College in Massachusetts next fall.

Subway Trestle by Russell Bittner

 

Unfortunately, the moment I come up from the subway tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, I always first hear—and then feel—this great sucking sound, and it’s always going straight for the greatly diminished contents of my wallet.  Manhattan is all about money.  Without great gobs of it, life in Manhattan ain’t much fun.

Brooklyn is another story.  If I had to pick one place in these United States to raise a family (the caveat being that this statement does not apply to all sections of this borough), it would be Brooklyn.  Three of my stories have a Brooklyn setting.  A fourth takes place at a midpoint between Manhattan and Brooklyn—namely, “Waltzing Matilda.”  “The Poet & the President” takes place in Manhattan, albeit involves a fictional Brooklyn resident.  Only my novella, “Something Special,” has no mention of Brooklyn whatsoever.  It starts and ends in Manhattan, though takes place principally in Yosemite National Park.

Brooklyn is small town writ large.  It has something of everything—and maybe more of it than anyplace else—including an enormous desire and energy to get off it and move into Manhattan.  It probably also has more aspiring artists (both fine and con) than any other place in the known universe.  Writers here are more plentiful—and cutthroat—than gangsters.

But as a place for kids, it just doesn’t get any better.  We all wear our 718 (area code) T-shirts with a kind of “Up yours!” pride—although the underlying sentiment is more of “I’d really rather be up yours than up mine.”

FARAWAY: Out of all of the stories in this collection, In the Animal Kingdom seems the most personal, the most laden with emotion.  It deals with a son grappling with his parents’ separation.  Was this a personal theme for you?

You’ve “outed” me, Daniel.  “In the Animal Kingdom” is—with a heady dose of imagination—virtually autobiographical.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday—largely, I think, because it’s about family reunions.  I grew up in a large family (the fifth of six children), and people were always drifting off to college.  However, Thanksgiving always brought them back—and least for a dinner.

When I realized I’d lost my own newer family and that I’d never have the privilege of a reunion with them again, I wrote this story.  It was a purgative of sorts.  It remains just that.

Garden in Winter by Russell Bittner

FARAWAY: Can you describe how writing a novella differs from the process of writing a short story or novel?

It’s longer.  Other than that, I don’t see any difference.  A novella is not an excuse to get slipshod with language any more than a poem is.  The last thing you as a writer want is to lose your reader’s attention.  Do that, and you might as well go fishing.  (Fishing, at least, has a better chance of putting something on the table.)

FARAWAY: What advice would you give to our readers about getting published?

Make friends with Daniel Sawyer—or with someone like him.  Publishing is a risky business.  There are, happily (for writers), a number of people in it who aren’t in it for the money.  If they all were, most of what passes for “literary fiction” would never get published—or if it did, only after a writer’s death.

There’s a great line in the script of “Shakespeare in Love,” and I firmly believe Tom Stoppard was having a private little giggle when he wrote it.  The producer of “Romeo and Juliet” says at one point in answer to the question “Who’s he?” (with an accusatory finger pointing directly at Shakespeare):  “Oh, he’s nobody.  He’s the writer.”

The fact of the matter is just that.  The writer is nobody…until he’s somebody—and those somebodies are rarer than water skies on ducks’ feet.

FARAWAY: We have gone about publishing Stories in a way that differs radically from traditional publication.  It is technically self-published.  What are your thoughts on the moniker “self-publication”?

It’s like kissing your sister.  I’m quite fond of my sisters—well, at least of one of them—but kissing her is not my idea of a Saturday night spectacle.

Do I really think anyone gives a hoot about a collection of short stories by an unknown writer?  No.  Everything I’ve ever heard or read speaks against it.  But here we are—and there’s no turning off the spigot. 

FARAWAY: In my opinion self-publication represents a large part of the future of publication.  With the decline of printed newspapers and the popularity of blogs and websites that offer do-it-yourself services, more people than ever will be able to publish their work, although they might not be able to secure the audience that a traditional publisher could get for their work.  What do you think of this trend?

For both our sakes, Daniel, I hope you’re right.  I’ll certainly do my bit to move this book even though the idea of self-promotion would be preferable only to having my teeth drilled without benefit of Novocain. 

FARAWAY: What are your thoughts on the process that we have gone through to make Stories available to the public?

I couldn’t be more grateful.  You, personally, have done far more than I could ever have expected or even desired of a publisher.  Do I wish you were independently wealthy and could be both publisher and benefactor?  Of course.  But wishes are born in heaven, lived on earth, die in hell.  I’ll be quite content to see these stories between two covers and out of my notebooks—where, but for a few publications here and there—they might otherwise have died.

Green-Wood Cemetery by Russell Bittner

I put on my hiking boots, get some advice and a map from Meredith at the front desk, and set out into the woods.  The path—an old carriage road—is quite clearly marked for most of the way.  Lack of observation or adequate light might get you easily lost—at which point there’s no telling where you’d end up—but the trail is a well-trodden one, and a bit of attention to others’ boot-prints leaves you in little doubt about your destination.  Well over an hour later, I see a sign telling me I’m still .7 mile away from the lake, and I realize this hike represents something more than a comfy Sunday stroll.  I may have to embellish a tad with Angie—not exactly a sportswoman from what I’ve seen—but the end will most assuredly justify the means.

My first view of water is no less stupefying than my first sight of the Redwoods and Sequoias as we entered the park.  And yet, my sighting of what I believe to be the lake is in error; the spot I want is still a quarter of a mile off.  I move on—and in the meanwhile, gaze occasionally up at what my map tells me are Mt. Watkins, Ahwiyah Point and Half Dome.  The names have all the poetry of lentil soup, but the view can’t be denied.  I wonder only how it is that Christian missionaries didn’t immediately throw down their crosses and go native when they first stood where I’m now standing.

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