... while eating our lunch at a bar/restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, named Great Dane. I didn't recall the name of the place, but I remember I was wearing a gray headband that kept slipping, so I went down into the catacomb to fix my then-hair. Later I shaved my head, but that's another story. It was early in 2001.
We wrote the composition by passing a real lined school notebook between us after each had written a paragraph. I personally cannot tell you who wrote which paragraph, anymore, but for at least a year, I would have been able to pin that down. In fact, I had some sort of hang-up over it long-distance because he had changed one of my dashes when he transcribed it from the notebook. That is hard for me to imagine now, but I remember that I reacted that way and closed my copy of it, maybe for good. Now the story has resurfaced on Wryting-L.
We didn't like these characters much at all. Yet there was something about their dilemma that had appeal for us. If we were making fun of someone in fiction -- not someone in particular, but an idea of two types -- then it was also mIEKAL making fun of fiction and me agreeing to it, agreeably. I think fiction ought to be made fun of, particularly in fiction, unless the fiction happens to be "beyond reproach." It is the need for the willing suspension of disbelief that metafictionists negotiate.
Now that I read this over and give it a little hair job, I think it has an earnestness and coherence that we didn't mean for it to have, unless mIEKAL went through it on his own later and gave it reasoning (but I think this is pretty much what we wrote and what he sent me back then with some light marking later). I think the story is about Brock's fantasy of the girl in high school and how he incorporated his fantasy, applying self-constraint, to become a successful salesman, and of how Cheryl as a former popular girl may have realized that she had in the course of being popular lent herself to fantasies of that type or of a worse type — and that it came with the turf of being popular.
What I especially like about this story: his tall ass. And her imaginary, reaching hand that reaches straight past his ass to a projected other destination further out along ground-level ether.
Ann Bogle
