Inspiration?

[Boss Radio]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Without a reason to go out, his casual clothes had shuffled themselves to the back of his closet. Weekends were spent in an undershirt, reading a book or watching TV. Dust gathered on his formal shoes. Sure, he cared about how he looked. Every morning before work he checked the mirror for breakfast caught in his teeth. His collars were clean and his slacks were pressed. His appearance, his demeanor, his attention, all of these things were for work, and the perhaps-twice-a-year family visits.

Beautifully rendered.

You rule!

[MerryPrankster]

I just wanted to say that I really enjoy reading this thread. Sometimes I read it late at night and then go to bed and mull over your incredible stories. What an amazing group of writers we have here. Bravo to all of you! Keep up the wonderful work!

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Obituary, Obituary:
Announcement for a holiday –
Death notice, it told us
How his bird soul flew away.

In acquiescence of inertia,
Put a bullet in his brain,
A little suicide vacation
Leaving naught but a stain.

She found him, she held him,
Her hair was gore’s mop;
Still the red stained the walls,
Spelling out: MAKE IT STOP

Stop the noise; stop the movement;
Stop my hair growing thinner; stop
Her breasts growing nearer to the ground.

Stop the mewing; stop the laughter;
Stop hushed whispers in the hall;
Stop the hours; stop the hurt;
Stop my absentee pleasure.

Stop the silence; stop the noise;
Stop the breeze; stop the piano; stop
memory, for mine is failing.

Stop the commotion; stop the blender;
Stop the moment; stop this lingering, for

My memory is failing
When I desire only to remember
Us as we were.

She felt the thinness of his bones,
Her breast sagged upon his chest,
How she longed to carve him open and crawl
Inside the hollow of his empty nest!

[€uroMeinke]

It began by leaving town, but more than that
I left my life behind.
My home
My friends
My family

All I had was the clothes in my suitcase
My memories
The quirks I decided to keep,
Or couldn’t over come
Fresh start in artifice

But now I was on the outside
And couldn’t get in
Without somehow admitting
My past, my experience,
The very things I had abandoned

So in the end, it was a fantasy,
An embarrassed confessional,
A failed reinvention
And so, I returned home
Till my next vacation.

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

The bar was crowded last night but the outside patio was less noisy and the music wasn’t so loud. We were sitting around a table eating stale chips and drinking beers, chatting about the meeting and getting to know each other better, just a bunch of theater ****s shooting the ****. My father was talking to a pretty French actress about how he and my mother met. I’ve heard this story a few times already, but each time a new detail is added, a little bit more revealed, and I know that memories aren’t absolute truths. In fact, some memories are grandiose fictions, but that doesn’t make them any less real to the one doing the remembering.

Memories are derelict houses getting a new coat of paint. Sometimes I remember doing something I’m fairly certain I’ve never done, but the memory lives inside my file cabinet mind as a permanent record, and so I choose to believe in it. Maybe my father inaccurately remembers the outfit my mother was wearing. Maybe she can’t quite recall who first held out a hand. But here is when he sees her. Here is when he guesses right that she’s easy, and he need only ask her back to his trailer for the afternoon and she’ll say yes.

“Yes.”

Years later my parents had moved to the suburbs together and had children. While still a toddler, my parents bought a cabin up in Big Bear Lake. I have never known how this came about. My father grew up skiing and has always loved the great outdoors. My mother is a city dweller who, if she never saw the country again, would never miss it. She gave skiing a try and she feigned sprained ankles so that medical teams would toboggan her down the mountain, and once my father had to carry her all the way down to level ground.

My brother and I loved the cabin. I love it still, even more now that it’s no longer ours. I remember every corner of it, every smell, from the crisp clean air that swept onto the patio to the musty old wet cloth smell of the basement apartment. The entire cabin was carpeted in electric blue shag and the walls were knotted wood. I squished the carpet in my toes and pulled at it like I would rip up grass; the walls were rough and scratched my hands but never gave me splinters. My brother and I slept in a loft space overlooking the living room while my parents retired to the master bedroom.

In the kitchen we kept nuts and seeds, which we fed to the gray squirrels, and we ate our meals off of blue and white floral patterned plates; I still own the tea set.

The singular heartbreak of my childhood was going to the cabin to remove our belongings and to shut the front door behind us for the last time. It was the first time I understood the expression, “nothing lasts”.

Still locked up inside of me are these half-invented memories and true tall tales of the weeks we’d spend there vacationing each year. Skiing in the winter. Hiking the rest of the year. We’d play indoors when the weather was menacing, pretending the basement apartment was our own shared space, separate from the parent’s world above. It was dark down there and it reminded us of someplace or someone old.

The cabin was purchased furnished. In the downstairs apartment were a stack of books and when my brother and I were old enough to read we flipped through them, but only one ever captured our complete attention: The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander. We laughed for a few minutes about the title after I explained to my brother the definition of hooker. Together we sat and read from excerpts from the text, and today the only story I remember in any detail was about a man with a penis so tiny he wore a dildo and tried to convince “The Happy Hooker”, in the dark, that it was his real organ. She discovered the ruse and coaxed him to be with her as himself.

She pleasured him and made him happy, and then she wrote a chapter about how his penis was smaller than her pinky finger.

My brother and I squealed with laughter and read some more. We hid the book and returned to it every time we came back to the cabin, each time wondering who it belonged to. Who were the perverts who owned the house before us? What wonderful human beings allowed for this window of depravity to open up every single time my family stole away for a little vacation, a respite that was supposed to take us away from the R-rated city.

God bless those who would take our G-rated childhood getaway and convert it into the grand Triple X!

Never once, not even now, did I ever suspect the book belonged to our parents. Our parents would never bring such filth into our two-home American dreamscape.

Flashforward and my father is still talking to a pretty French actress about how he and my mother met, how years before the cabin in Big Bear was purchased, my parents were introduced at a luncheon. Their first conversation was about a book they were both reading, The Happy Hookerby Xaviera Hollander. She asked if he’d gotten to a certain part in the story, and he said he had.

“Have you tried it?”

“No.”

“Would you like to go someplace with me?"

"Yes."

The truth of my parent’s history is revealed to me in increments, stories that are told and retold, each time with little embellishments, or embellishments removed. Each time a new detail or circumstance comes to light or is obscured.

Last night I learned that the copy of The Happy Hooker that my brother and I read and hid and laughed about, and got turned on by and hid and found again, belonged to my parents. They talked about it, probably read it allowed to turn each other on. My brother’s and my dirty cabin secret was their conversational ice breaker, and it was from that ice breaker that love - sex love, friendship love, hate love, baby love, loyalty love, family love, all kinds of love - was born.

[blueerica]

I can't even begin to say enough how wonderful it is to be able to read what you write, Audra.

.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Holy crap, babe. That felt as real as anything. And so stripped down, so simple. Wonderful. Pseudo mojo!

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Holy crap, babe. That felt as real as anything. And so stripped down, so simple. Wonderful. Pseudo mojo!

As you now know, it's based on real events. Though, from my point of view, obviously. I'm sure I've misremembered things all over the place, but I think the truth is in tact. And I DO remember that cabin exactly. There's nothing made up about that. And those squirrels? The grayest, prettiest squirrels I've ever seen. Ah, Big Bear. I miss Big Bear.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

4 days of our Honeymoon was spent in Big Bear. Big Bear is rad.

I don't think it's any less good, now that I know that it is true.

[Boss Radio]

Audra, you are a mighty ninja master.