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"Peppercorn Rent" by Roberta Rogow (Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre)

Honest, I'll go back to Cheever soon enough

This one is a cute one. It is so cute in fact that the author told me that she didn't like the anthology and I can totally see why. Roberta is a filk singer, a Sherlock Holmes fan fiction writer and a children's author. Also a children's librarian.

I can see why she did not appreciate seeing her story after a story about The Big Bad Wolf killing himself in a vomit filled apartment because Little Red Riding Hood is having an orgy with the three little pigs (and before a story about mutant rats). Seriously the more stories I read in this anthology, the more I wonder why I bought so many stories about hopeless losers living in filth? Granted, at this point I wrote my first novel-length manuscript where the main characters are named Dogshit and Trash and Dogshit leaves Trash asleep in a pile of dirty diapers in the alleyway in the opening chapter (I would have to become much much more famous for it to ever see the light of day. The best I can say about it is that I learned a lot. Also "Let's Live Suddenly Without THinking" is a great title. Yeah I did steal it from e.e.cummings)

And the main reason why this one is in this anthology is because I lost the rights to a story about a guy who could paint people's souls to the point that they lose the most vital part of themselves (causing a suicide before he's killed.) My (ex-)friend wrote it and since he presented femail at the time I figured that I needed another woman written story for balance. So I reached out to Roberta as a friend of a friend (aunt of an ex-girlfriend to be exact) and here we are.

This might be the first time I re-read the story since I published this anthology (this is true for a lot of these stories. By the time I finally put out the book I didn't even want to look at it again. Especially when I had to fix the typos twice (like I went through and fixed all the typos I could find. Then found dozens more. It's still full of typos. Pro-tip, running a spell check and grammar check is NOT copyediting).

I appreciate this story a lot more. I didn't know about the convention of peppercorn rent as a British thing and the main character is obviously a werewolf. The main thrust of the story is the fact that the peppercorn rent is that the daughter of the house needs to spend the night with the lord and since Ms. Lupine (get it?) is renting a very cheap upper room, she wants to make certain that it gets paid.

Meanwhile the new lord wants to sell the land in order to put a burger chain store on it. The rest of the story is a comedy of errors as the lord continually tries to run away from the protagonist and they keep ending up stuck in restaurants and punk clubs. And jail.

Also she's a werewolf.

One part that I might have been less enamored with when I published but I rather enjoy now is the "doesn't quite get the current times" part. I think I learned to appreciate this in the works of other authors and artists. The club is too loud and the band fronted by a singer who calls himself Lime Green Jello is a little broad - not as broad as the punk rock episode of Quincy, but definitely silly enough to forgive the fact that one doubts that the author has ever been in a punk club. Also Lime Green Jello is the CEO of the burger franchises? That's a bit of a stretch. LIke CEOs are usually too busy figuring out ways to screw their workers and not pay taxes to have a side gig fronting a punk band, but ok, we'll go with it here.

Overall, this is a silly story with decent characters and enjoyable plot contrivance.

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"The Bella Lingua" (The Stories of John Cheever)

John Cheever really liked Italy

A long time ago, I read an article explaining that Stephen King is a great writer without being a good writer. Great because he puts everything on the page. Not good because he's loaded with cliches, doesn't know how to end a book and gets all "hello fellow kids" when he's dealing with a character who isn't a baby boomer.

One thing that intrigues me about Cheever is just how much of himself ends up in the page. This can be a drawback (like how many stories am I going to read about white dudes in the suburbs?) but it also feels like I'm on a journey with the man.

And I didn't even need to google to know that he spent some time in Italy and it became his ideal land. Still I googled and yes, he's very much into Italy.

So the last story in this collection (The Trouble with Marcie Flint) is about a woman dealing with the fact that her husband took off to Italy without telling her when he'd be back, only to kick him out of the house when he finally returns, leading him to go back to Italy, this story is about a divorced man living in Italy.

A great deal of this story is description. Repeatedly the characters are either enchanted by Italy of vaguely discomfited. They are getting robbed or they are failing to adapt.

Streeter is the main character but he's not the only one who gets a perspective. He's in Italy enjoying the beauty and trying to learn the language in order to adapt, but he's not an immigrant. He's an expat.

There are comedic scenes of him going through teachers. One teacher won't stop reading Pinocchio at him. The other teacher wants to talk about her terrible fiance. A third teacher seems flirtatious, enough for him to try something and get screamed at.

But finally there's a teacher who actually is good at teaching Italian, mostly because she had to learn it herself as she's from Iowa. The last part of the story turns to her and her son and her uncle who wants to take them both home.

The uncle scenes contrast with Streeter due to the fact that he's got an image of Italy as a place that you take a vacation in. So he does the tourist things and gets mugged on his way to her place. There's rather a wonderful way that you can contrast the characters simply in their viewpoints of Italy.

So the climax is the confrontation where Streeter has faded from the protagonist to an audience member between the Uncle and his Italan teacher with the son so out of step with Italy that there's no way that he's staying.

But the teacher - well her past in a small town in Iowa was hell. So there's a new contrast. Streeter is in Italy because he's divorced and he's romanticizing Italy. HIs Italian teacher had such a crap time in her town that she's never going back.

In America, we have a couple cities that serve as the "Everyone belongs because no one belongs here really" but for someone who truly suffered as a youth, not even New York or Los Angeles could be far enough away.

This is one of those stories that I think I'll be reading again. Some day. I enjoyed it a great deal.

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"The Worm in the Apple" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Better. This one is better. It also feels very meta or self-parodying as John Cheever takes a break from his usual bad marriages and drunks of Shady Hill to tell a story about the Crutchmans, a perfectly happy couple with children who grow up healthy.

Two things before I go on. First I think that the reason why George on Seinfeld thinks that having an affair is adult is a generation gap thing. The generation gap didn't end with the 60s when all the hippies decided to go corporate.

I know. I know. I'm going to keep talking about tensions between Baby Boomers and "The Greatest Generation" with the "greatest generation" being a bunch of fuck ups who were scarred by a war that they had to approach with toxic positivity after it was over. The Great War. The big one. The best years of our lives. And oh yeah, no one is talking about it because they went through some fucking trauma.

So George thinking that an affair is adult is because the "greatest generation" was the last generation that thought that it was stuck in their marriages, so of course they had affairs. And that dumbass question "Why don't marriages last?" has an easy answer. THey don't have to. No one has to stay in a miserable marriage. So the Baby Boomers just got divorced and after the Baby Boom we can experiment. Group marriages, polyamory, monogamish, cuckolding, key parties, weird religious culty marriages, etc.

There was a second thing but I forgot it.

So this story is funny because Cheever has a narrator wondering what the fuck is wrong with this couple. When is the other shoe going to drop? Like maybe the war will tear them apart. Maybe she makes too much money. Maybe he will get drunk.

There's also a part where everyone wonders why neither husband nor wife has an affair. Yeah, that greatest generation cheated fits here (but most of the Cheever stories have infidelity and drinking). Were they prudes? Were they monogamous?

And their children - well they had some problems but they turned out ok. Sure the daughter ran off with a gardener's son and was pregnant when she married and the son was held back a year, but overall they were fine.

This is a slight story, which makes sense because it's a one joke story where the major point is that this is a happy couple so what the hell are they doing in a Cheever story? But it was what I needed after that damn bus story.

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"The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" (The Stories of John Cheever)

What the hell, Cheever

In a reverse of the SOP of this blog, I'm going to take a bit from the Wikipedia on the story collection that is named for this story.

"If there is any weakness in these stories, it is Cheever's reliance on sudden, fortuitous escapes from or alleviations of his character's difficulties. The crisis in these people's live are real and painful, but the ends of the crisis come so abruptly, and in some cases, so implausibly, that it may be hard for the reader to feel their seriousness" - Lynne Waldeland

So this one is weird because you think that it's going to be some freaky morality tale about a man who lives in the suburbs and starts stealing from his neighbors in order to keep his business going. He mentions his mother hates his wife. He has a fight with his wife and almost leaves her but she comes back to him. He notes that his father showed up when he was a kid and took him to a burlesque theater. His father was a drunk, so was his father responsible for his strange habit of stealing money at parties and trying to break into houses? Why did his kid give him a ladder?

Unlike the previous story which is a slight story, this one actually ratchets up the tension and then...he gets his job back and he does one final break-in to give one family back their money.

Yeah. So I kind of made a point about the previous story being about the rich being cushioned in their bubbles, but this is about a suburban white guy who gets away with crimes because who would suspect a suburban white guy of stealing from them.

And then he gets the money back to the people he robbed and everything is fine.

I am tempted to think that this story has a major theme about privilege and suburban life and that the ending is really genius. Still it feels like a wet fart of an ending.

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"The Superintendent" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Recently, I got annoyed with the annual discussion of how much do you tip the super. This is not a discussion that ever happened in Minnesota. But in New York, it's expected that you tip the super because everyone assumes that the super is fixing their pipes and painting their halls from the goodness of his heart and not becuase he's living rent free in a New York apartment complete with a salary.

Also I'm broke. I can barely pay my rent so "how much do you tip the super" is one of those "Hey Tim, guess you're too poor for us" conversations similar to the "year spent in Israel" and the "where are you vacationing this year" conversations. I try not to get too "eat the rich" but capitalism makes monsters of us all.

In "The Superintendent" we have another one of John Cheever's working class heroes. Only instead of the elevator operator who can't be bothered to do his fucking job, this time we have a character who fixes the boiler by himself and has to deal with the tenants and their problems.

The major thrust of this story is the fact that he's trying to move one woman into an apartment that the family is moving out of. The family can no longer afford to live in the apartment because New York and if the landlord can find a reason to jack up the rent, then the landlord is going to jack up the rent (oddly enough this has become a national problem with New York relatively civilized with rent control and rent stabilization - something that libertarian shitheads love to rail against under the theory that if only NYC did away with all that then all the rents would go down - because the market isn't a bunch of greedy shitheads trying to get as much as possible. No, the market is a living breathing creature that only gets nasty when people try to fix it for poor people. But if only the damn liberals would shut up and trying to make things better for poor people, then the market would totally behave nicely and we'd all be paying rent).

Where was I? Oh yeah, landlords are assholes who screw people. And it's even worse outside of NYC these days as a friend trying to find an affordable place in Florida taught me.

So this character is the hateful middle man who takes the money and fixes up places and when the tenants beg him to ask the landlord to give them a break, the super just goes "sorry, I don't know the landlord. It's a corporate entity". So this dude's main problem is getting a family out of their apartment. They might have a place to go. He doesn't care.

He just wants to get the place emptied out and move more people in. Fuck this guy.

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"The Season of Divorce" (The Stories of John Cheever)

The title is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this one. This story is basically about a man who wonders if his wife is going to be affected by the weird stalker guy who keeps professing love.

The story feels pretty meh in execution but it does leave one thinking about how relationships work, mostly how infatuation is so much easy compared to actually being in a relationship. When you are infatuated you know what you feel. It's overwhelming. It's all consuming and it's doomed. How often do we become infatuated with people who actually want to be with us? That'd be too messy. Better to engage in a hopeless crush.

Now sometimes we get infatuated with our friends and if we want to say friends, we clamp that shit down as hard as possible (after the embarrassing "thanks but no thanks" conversation) and hope that we can stay friends. Sometimes we can. Usually we need time away from each other.

But hopeless infatuation where she will never return the feelings? Amazing how attractive that is (especially for those of us who survived child abuse and don't really want to risk an actual relationship becuase in our experience actual relationships hurt).

This is told from the husband who doesn't know his wife's mind. He's pretty sure she doesn't care for this guy but he's also pretty sure his wife hasn't told the guy to fuck off for all time. In fact when he tells the guy to fuck off, his wife expresses sympathy.

So as far as the husband is concerned, it feels like an intrusion. He's right but he's also wrong. And that's the problem. Infatuation is easy. Relationships are hard. Are you in love? Do you even like this person? Are you running a day care with someone you used to have sex with? Who knows.

Anyhow no one gets a divorce in this story, so that title is just hanging there defining everything.

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The Summer Farmer (The Stories of John Cheever)

Recently, I've started watching season 5 of Mad Men (Zuvi Zuvi Zoooo) and the DVD had a message from Canadian Whiskey, a company featured strongly on this show. The actor representing the whisky says that the whiskey brand is proud to sponsor Mad Men, a show about a time when "Men were Men". And wow, talk about missing the whole fucking point of the show.

Don Draper is a fiction, a fake, a persona put on by a poor broken man who ran as far away from his dirt farmer upbringing.

Speaking of which, we have Paul Hollis, the city man who wants to think that he's still a man by farming. He's more like the Roger Sterling of the Cheever stories, except Roger Sterling doesn't act on his insecurities by spending the summers farming.

By contrast, we have Kasiak, the Russian emigre who still believes in the Communist Revolution (but probably not Stalin since he's in America and not Russia) and as far as Paul is concerned, he's everything that Paul isn't. He's naturally into farming. He's dismissive of capitalism. He's just there with his other culture. And Paul decides to needle him every opportunity he gets,because Paul is that kind of jerk that cannot let someone just make him feel insecure without trying to do the same.

So the ending - rabbits die. Poisoned. Paul blames Kasiak and pushes him away in what could start a fight but Kasiak just takes it. And then it turns out that his wife accidentally poisoned the rabbits.

So there you go. America vs. Russia in upstate New York. With America killing its own while blaming Russia. Which could be a metaphor for McCarthyism if McCarthyism wasn't 5 years after the publication of the story.

But mostly, it's one guy trying to be the man. And making a fool of himself.