ELECTRIC LETTERS

by T.C. Emerson / Feather Touch

(Ped., inc., rom.)


FILE I


Erica Jensen to Tom Emerson

       You polluting piece of shit, you asshole, you wicked, nasty, ogre (I’m only eleven and I don’t like to say to many bad words, guess it’s kind of a class and character issue), you bum, you nerd, you smart alec, know-it-all wise guy, you pervert, you skunk, you drain-drinking moron, I had a great dad, and now it’s over.  He read one of your stories, and he raped me.  What do you think of that Mr. High and Mighty Thinks He’s God?  My own daddy.  All over me.  And all because of your story and your – ha, ha – skill.  Well, I read, I hang out at the library, and I have a little skill of my own and I think you’re a twisted, kinky slut.  I bet you don’t even answer this.  Go to hell.
       
Tom Emerson to Erica Jensen

       Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel, you obviously know the title, that emotionalized an issue that required all the reason then existing on the planet.  Hundreds of thousands died because of her words on paper, and sores were opened that fester to this very day, yet she is regarded as a literary hero.  Do you suppose she ever lay awake at night, carnage in every newspaper, and said to her self, “God, what have I done?”  Hitler, as his very children bled out in the ruins of Berlin giving the Western World a fifty year reprieve from the fatal embrace of socialism, do you suppose he ever said Wish I hadn’t written that?  Yes, these are rationalizations, probably those Stephen King used when it was discovered his “Rage” was a blueprint for Columbine.  It is, Erica, like debt for corporations, they dare it, because they fail to exist without it, and overwhelmingly – look around you – it works.  By the same token a writer like myself takes on a burden of moral responsibility and accountability, why? because we can’t exist without it.  We, a tiny handful of us, tell the truth, and the truth is, if you read a few stories on Nifty, alone, if you prefer, hidden away, just you an the monitor, you are going to find, my young friend, the stories – not of a few girls and boys that like alternative behavior, because that’s all it is, and not all that “alternative”, at that, but, if you have the time, thousands of stories, and then tens of thousands.  These stories are very often true, and if even only a single one was, doesn’t that at least open a channel for thinking: that if one girl or boy loved what happened at your age, there must be at least a seed of validity to their lives and experiences?  Rhetorical.  Answer, obvious.  And when you come to know that there are, as I said, thousands, and, further, that the responses aren’t just positive in any sort of grudging way (better than getting a jock disease in the back seat), but practically definitions of bright-eyed enthusiasm, you will have at least begun assembling the two and two I use for guidance in my work.  As I said, these stories are not only favorable, but wildly enthusiastic, and, which is what makes me a fellow traveler, almost universally sensitive.  Most writers – practically all – place every possible emphasis on, a, overall responsible behavior, and, b, long term acceptance by the juvenile or juveniles involved.  I am writing what literally thousands of others are writing, and, Erica, just as a point of reference, my work is downloaded at a rate that would have me on top of print best-seller lists as a permanent fixture over the last two and a half years.  
       
       I would like to write back and forth.  As a human, of course I’m grieved by your particular situation.  You show an extreme level of both talent and development in your letter.  Should you pursue writing seriously, you will pray, daily, that at one time or another, the Muses, who have been around two or three thousand years, will take over for you.  Bowing to their experience, and, as you know,, they consist of nine Greek females, instead of having the pissant effrontery to tell them what to say.  Any skills you bring to the table through reading and incessant practice are only secretarial, in being able to transcribe accurately and, this is the hard part, very, very quickly.  If you can’t type a hundred words a minute, they’re going to stick you with some slow-witted trainee, probably a pet niece or something, you know, nepotism.
       
       Again, it would be nice to hear from you, and let me end on a simple note by saying I’m very sorry for what happened.
       

Erica Jensen to Tom Emerson


       I never expected to hear from you.  I don’t know what to say, so I’ll have to pick my way slowly and leave the 100 wpm thing up to you.  (It must be nice.)  Dad’s just so great, but he’s my dad.  I looked up what happened.  All societies condemn it.  It’s not legal or morally acceptable anywhere.  And what if one kid like me is raped because of what you say?  And have you ever been so scared to come out of your room you wet yourself in a jar, putting the frog inside the pillowcase, then dumped it out the window?  It’s not right for a girl.


Tom Emerson to Erica Jensen

       If you make bald statements such as “it’s not right for a girl” then how can it be worthwhile writing, not that you invited me to respond or anything, but at least let’s end, if that’s how it’s to be, on a more open note.  You are not a stone in a gravel pit, or a slice of pie in a deli.  “Not right for a girl” says it all?  I – don’t – think – so.  Cystic fibrosis isn’t right for a girl.  Car accidents.  Getting hauled into an alley by a biker or wino.  But between you and a father who you sketch as a nice adult male?  If we’re going to write back and forth, try not to put things in the airtight boxes beloved of pat-thinking socialists.  Your challenge is to learn the difference between helter-skelter hippy thinking and the autocracy of the brainwashed.  Some things are as absolute as cystic fibrosis, but others challenge you, as a human, with yin and yang, as the Chinese have it, and, believe it or not, if it does nothing else, it makes life more interesting.  Do write again.


Erica to Tom

       I’ve got to tell you something right away.  I found it on – well, okay, I’m smiling just a little – Nifty.  It’s in their Incest section and it’s called “Rebecca”.  If made me feel – still trying to smile – all embarrassed.  Talk about not knowing what I was talking about.  You weren’t kidding.  The people in the story care about each other, first, and if it happens they’re attracted to each other, then the stuff happens.  I was going to write “exciting stuff” but I don’t think I’m quite there, yet.  You’re beginning to make me see that it is a transient world, and that anything that lasts a few months is likely to make it with one to their deathbed, and that the only option for enduring contentment is not necessarily eighteen year old girl marrying twenty year old boy (from another whole village) and having four legitimate kids.  And you never put down that way; the little girl’s doll and imaginary tea-party dreams, Ken and Barbie, though they probably validate alternatives rather than convention.

       I liked the story.  I’m going to find others.  You must be very busy to be so mind-boggling prolific, so I won’t bother you any more, but do count me half recovered.


Tom to Erica


       Seems to me we have a few months to go if we’re going to qualify and d’bed sources of mutual reminiscences.  On the other hand, you’re probably busy with school and a hundred things so I don’t want to intrude on your time.


Erica to Tom


       I’ve been drilling on Mavis Beacon, and can do a little rationalizing of my own by calling this typing practice, plus I can do the letter keys now, so it goes a lot faster.  I guess that sounds kinda dopey, alluding to typing when it comes to writing to a great writer, and, hey, I just read “Poet of Phu Bai”, so a king, too.  Weird-o-rama as Audrey says in the movie.  I think the Net’s the only thing that’s not toast in the whole kitchen.  I hope we can keep writing, but you must have a zillion fans, and I wasn’t very friendly in my first letter, so I’ll understand if you can’t.


Tom to Erica.


       Your last letter brings up the subject of why be a writer in the first place, because the one word answer is, No, I get zero fan mail.  From “Beyond Brewster” which you may have read by this time, from “Poet” or from any of my stories posted in the last year or so.  It’s something of a phenomenon, because my first published story “Jimmy and Frogger” (nom de plume: Feather Touch), posted on a site called ASSTR, much like Nifty, and one of the latter’s mirrors, and that story is still selling at five to seven hundred copies a week.  It’s probably the politics and cultural editorializing, you know, sort of a turn off, but I don’t even get flamed.  All this to say that it may not be the smartest thing in the world to try to commercialize any talent – and yours is patent – a writer might have, not a real writer.  You will be rewarded in no finite way.  “The New York Review” hasn’t noted anything beyond competent journeymen in the last year and a half, which is how long I’ve been glancing at it.  Print is out, especially for fiction, and the Net doesn’t pay.  After your novelty wears off, you won’t get a letter a month.  But then there are the download reports every week from ASSTR.  Your numbers stay high.  You have something like seventy files online.  If one is being downloaded at such-and-such a rate, they all are, just like every egg in a pot of boiling water will be of equal hardness after a certain amount of boiling.  Suddenly you realize that, hey, no mail, but huge readership, and the stories archived pretty much forever as they go from Nifty to other sites and p2p’s.  Then you think again and say, again, hey, wait a minute, I’ve never written an author, thousands of books though I’ve read, and never felt the slightest desire to do so, and when that happens you find yourself pretty pleased that, yes, you got a couple of hundred nice letters, at all.  In other words, believe it or not, at this point you are my only known fan, and I hope you keep writing.


Erica to Tom


       How fast do you have to type for them, those ancient ladies of inspiration, to kick in?  Sometimes I feel, just for a minute or two, that I’m like on the crest of a wave, body surfing, and going ahead without paddling or kicking.


Tom to Erica


       That’s incredible at your age, because that’s just the feeling.  I’m fifty-seven so the waves are a little bigger, and I can even tap dance on the bogie board if I think anyone’s looking, but the essential feeling is the same.  You sort of zero down to a perfect state of almost somnolent lethargy, and yet your fingers keep moving and the words keep moving across the screen.  Total congratulations, but remember, it’s just a novelty act, not for personal gain.


Erica to Tom


       But so much fun!  And what a great hobby.  Once you’ve got the ‘puter, it costs about a millionth part of what boating or golf would.   But what to write about, that’s the question.


T to E


       There is nothing, sorry.  Perhaps that’s the whole point, why “The Review” has nothing much about anyone special; not their fault, the writers, it’s just that there’s nothing left as far as subject matter goes.  Of course, here I’m talking about print.  That leaves me trying to ease into risky territory, I might as well come right out and say it, because, yes, there is something you can write about, assuming you haven’t been picked as the world’s youngest Rhodes Scholar or something like that, but it’s a place we talked about in the beginning of our correspondence, and you might not be thrilled out of your mind at the thought of going back there.  To be hanged for a sheep instead of a lamb, I’ll cut to the chase.  You and your dad.  That’s the story to start with; I just hate mentioning it because you might think I’m trying to lure you into a titillating correspondence.


E. to T.


       Mavis should have a segment on typing with shaking fingers.  The jitters.  Thank you for springing it on me as gently as you could, but most of all for coming out and saying it.  I don’t know why I’m so nervous, because I finally looked up “Jimmy and Frogger” and it made me laugh so hard I started hiccupping.  If I can’t trust you, who can I?  I’ll bet you know more about the human condition than anyone in the world, and I do trust you, but I don’t know where to start.  What I wondered is if you could ask me questions; quiz me like your characters do if their partner’s are into, what is it, verbal voyeurism?  It would really help, and I understand you might ask some pretty explicate questions. 


T. to E.


       As we go along, maybe, but there won’t be that many.  A lot of writers cop out a little, I think, by including event after event, and, pretty much, it’s the first few, you know, times that are interesting from the reader’s point of view.  After all, the physics and chemistry involved is universal.  I should interrupt myself here to say that if you write, I will publish with your true name.  Don’t ask my why, but it’s essential to me to use real people – names, dates, places – as a modeler uses an armature for his clay.  Not only to use “real” as I go along, but to know that they will be published, “real”. Keep in mind, it’s not an entirely sane occupation.  You are able to do something, assuming you continue as beautifully as you have begun, that only the rarest handful of others can do.  Put an add for brain surgeons in a medical journal, if the position’s attractive, you’ll get dozens of applications.  High end programmers.  Physicists.  Chemists.  Look around you, don’t you have every product of genius imaginable, including a computer far beyond the wildest fantasies of anyone on earth a mere thirty years ago?  There’s someone, and usually half a hoard, to do anything – except – write brilliantly at the cutting edge of where we are and where we should go.  While this is universally true, it’s twice as accurate to add: in carnal and salacious matters concerning juveniles.

	The air is thin and cold, but offers a good view and little resistance.  I won’t say anything corny like come soar with me, but I wouldn’t, either, want to underplay both the challenge and significance involved in your deciding to continue on, under your own name and using your dad’s name.  So, to get to practical things, why don’t you tell me about him, and we can stumble along from there?  If you’re ready to talk about what happened, I’d suggest, if possible, trying to cast it in terms of things he did with you rather than to you.


E. to T.

	I kept trying to push him away.  Maybe it was my fault, in a way.  It happened on a camping trip.  I suggested we zip our sleeping bags together so he could cuddle me while we slept.  I woke up in the middle of the night and he had my nighty up over my hips and he was, you know, up between my legs and thrusting against me.  It made me feel all hot and strange, and I knew it was wrong because everyone says so.  I tried to get him to stop.  I was too scared to say anything, and I think maybe he was mostly asleep, anyway, so I tried pushing him with my hands and he kept thrusting and I kept pushing and suddenly he got all stiff and tense and it got all slippery on my hands, at first, then kind of sticky, and I was like totally wet all over my tummy and I thought maybe it was blood or something, but it was pitch dark and I couldn’t see.  He’d been kind of panting while I was trying to push him away, but his breathing went back to normal after what happened, and he was snoring a little so I knew he was asleep, and I spent the rest of the night trying to wipe up, well, now I know it was his sperm, and I couldn’t get back to sleep because I was afraid it might happen again.

       The next morning he could see something was wrong and he tried to find out what it was, but I was mad and totally confused because by then I’d figured out it must have been some kind of thing to do with sex and that he’d raped me.  Then I was scared that he’d got me pregnant because I was so wet all over and I almost didn’t see how there could be that much of his seed on my skin and I wouldn’t get a baby from it because I know from biology all it takes is one and he did millions with me.  
       
       How did I trace it to you?  I guess you’ll want to know that.  From his laptop.  One of your stories, I don’t know which, because only the last few pages of the story were in the file, but it was about a man molesting his daughter and it was all o-loo-la-la like the greatest thing that could ever be, and at the end it said: “Posted by Thomas@btl.net,” so I wrote.
       
       More about my dad.  No complaints, to sum it up.  My three girlfriends all think I’m like awesomely lucky to have him for my father.  He’s comptroller for NASCAR and calls himself a bean counter, but he loves it and takes the job very seriously.  We talk about his work all the time and he explains how it’s important to have a little slack, I mean give people a little slack when it comes to the money part of the corporation, and not be mister stringent and micromanager all the time.  I guess he looks quite a bit like Rick Schroeder, you know, when he played on “NYPD Blue”, or maybe a little like McVeigh, body wise, but with a smarter looking face.  He’s thirty two years old, which is kind of a joke in the family because every once in awhile he gets carded, once even for a movie, though he says the cashier was just trying to flirt with him.  My mom’s the same age.  Twice people have called us sisters, which makes her happy for about five years.  Allen and Paul are my two brothers.  Allen’s thirteen, Paul and I both twelve for a month this year, but he’s older.  We have four cats and four dogs, but small ones, dachsunds.  I guess you can figure out we live near Daytona Beach because of Dad’s work.  We live in a poor neighborhood in a California bungalow so that we’ll have plenty of money left over for books and touring battlefields and museums and living in a village in Mexico part of the year so we can practice our Spanish and learn to fully appreciate – I guess this sounds corny, Dad says it is, but stick with it – to appreciate the extra things we do have.  Our car is a ten year old Silver Spur we call Maiden.  He, Ryan, my dad isn’t trying to be weird or anything, but his feeling is when we get older we’ll want to rebel against something, so we can rebel against being different, you know, living in a bungalow and driving a Rolls, and thus end up salted and pickled in the mainstream, accountants, all.
       
       I guess that’s some of it.  I hope I hear back from you soon.  Mavis would approve, but I sit here kind of wondering what Dad would say if he knew.
       

T. to E.


	We’re going as fast I ever go, Erica; did you know that?  Two days and almost 3,500 words.  Good girl, good person.  I used to check my mail once a day, now I do every few hours and there you are, welcome as gin to a planter.  I live in a small Caribbean backwater, pretty literally, called Belize.  A lot of stuff about it in my various stories, so I won’t go on and on, plus, it’s pretty much a cliché: living in paradise, the exotic overtones of an African culture, the weather, the foliage and birds, but, as a Floridian, you’re sort of half way there, yourself, plus you have K-Mart and Denny’s.  Samantha, my girlfriend has taken up many pages over the last two years.  I can tell you more about her as we go along, but, to sum it up, she’s a “mysterious ways” payment, and in full, thank you, for the thousands of hours I put in on the Internet.  Much of my writing is based on numerous, but certainly not an excessive number, of actual relationships and experiences.  Although I had no background in anything, I waylaid a camp counselor when I was nine, and so, myself, had a partial introduction to what can happen at a relatively early age.
	
	Your lifestyle sounds exemplarily, and, in the strange world abornin’, almost a fantasy.  Your dad must have an IQ of about a million to avoid status seeking in the subdivisions, and the Rolls Royce is a perfect touch.  Free transportation, because I have a feeling he maintains it well, so it will probably be worth enough in another ten year to pay for using it.  Of course, the books are the most exciting thing to me.  I picture a bungalow half overflowing with all kinds of reading material, nominal time wasted by any of you on excessive housekeeping, Lexan windows in case the neighborhood gets poorer, and your conversation laden with Spanish; you know, words like momentito, or just moment, which is so much handier than wait-a-minute when someone’s knocking at the door, verdad?   (Pleas do not exercise me by writing much in the language.  If I have a brain, it’s ninety percent creative and highly deficient when it comes to learning, thus I managed to live for almost five years in Torreon, Coahuila, two hundred miles south of Chihuahua, without picking up anything that would get me beyond the kitchen of a Spanish household.)

	We had dachsunds growing up, too.  My guess is they were bred by Attila so no one would approach his throne while he was pillaging.  I have four cats, now, king of whom is Pantherito, a giant black animal who speaks in long paragraphs.  I live on the second floor of a medium size house for the area, with a local family living downstairs.  It’s perfect for a writer because it keeps me in contact with the real world.  When Tonton wakes me up at seven in the morning to beg a cigarette for his crack-head mother, after I’ve worked until five, it’s a great leveler of egos.  That starts the day.  Then it’s five or six visitors until dark, so I’ve gotten into the habit of napping during the day, as best I can, and working at night when I can concentrate.  Sort of a backward way of doing things, and, according to some psychiatrists, a conclusive sign of schizophrenia.  I’m prickly and short-tempered – partly by nature, and partly because time is all an artist has (like the rest of us, I reckon) so guarding it is a priority.  I lucked out in the genetic department and still have a teenage body, though I’m crippled by chronic thrombo phlebitis which I contracted, acutely, while setting up a fishing operation here in Dangriga.  That was a classic case of lemonade from lemons, because being confined to bed for a year and a half awakened me to the possibilities of actually working – in bed – and I found, a little later, that by doing so I could but in twenty or thirty hours as a session, while sitting even in a comfortable chair limited most writing days to five or six hours.  Recently, I commonly write ten thousand words a day, and once did slightly over seventeen thousand at a stretch.  I mention this because it’s very much part of the secret of my output, but that’s a personal situation because other writers have published at the half million words a year pace I maintain, and I doubt they wrote in bed (or had phlebitis).  I guess it could be taken askance for an adult to describe his bed to a strange child on the Net, but it, too, is part of the secret.  It’s a common type bed but with wooden slats covering the bottom, where the box-spring would fit, in the States.  I have a foam, about thirty inches wide, to lie on, and the computer and monitor sit on the slats at my right elbow.  It is fantastically comfortable, and if there is any greater reward for eight or ten hours at the keyboard, Samantha excepted, than rolling over for a quick cat nap, I’d like to know what it is.  Also, the head of the bed is five inches higher than the foot, and that makes quite a difference when it comes to sitting up in bed.  I don’t think it would work if you couldn’t touch type, looking at the monitor while the keyboard is on your lap, so stick with Mavis like she had a magic wand and golden goose.  As to that, look at it this way.  Every top executive in the world would pay you a hundred thousand dollars if you could teach him to touch type at a reasonable speed.  It’s nearly the ultimate skill and, in this day and age, should be taught in kindergarten, with Chicklet-size keys.  

	I give household hints in some of the essays I include in my novels, and I get quite a kick out of domestic life, partly because there’s so little of it.  For example, I once went over five years without stepping inside a shop of any kind.  I think polyester fabrics are the unsung miracle of the modern age for the poor – and do I know the poor!  I remember my mother darning cotton socks when I was maybe six or eight years old.  She had to put an egg in each toe, then reweave the material with needle and thread; same for the heel.  They wore out in weeks.  I haven’t worn any in almost ten years, but the last pairs I had, in the States, lasted years and never showed the slightest sign of loosening at the ankles or wearing out.  Same with all other garments.  They wear like iron, which is especially important in a culture totally committed to laundry as is our here.  I remember on my second visit bringing some expensive dress shirts from the States.  Every time my neighbor at the time washed them, they’d come back noticeably lighter, and I finally had to wash them, myself.  This fits in with your dad’s efforts to get you to appreciate extra things, but even ordinary things can be pretty extra if you compare them to their ancestors, so to speak.

	Your story of your first time with your dad brought back a horrible memory, vaguely related.  It was my first night at summer camp.  At about ten at night I suddenly had to use the toilet, but, in the confusion of moving in, I didn’t know where it was.  That was a very, very, very, very long night, and I finally had to relieve myself, which made in considerably longer.  Anytime you, in your life, do anything new with kids be sure these needs are met.  Anyway, I know what it’s like, perhaps almost as a soldier does, to await the dawn.  As to the psychological part, my suggestion is to be aware that the attraction of girls your age to adult males is, to put it mildly, overpowering.  In Victorian times, and this was specifically confirmed by my ultra-Victorian grandmother, no young girl of any age was ever to be left alone in the company of an older male under any circumstances.  Period.  Exclamation point.  Never, ever.  Her father, her older brothers, her uncles, the minister, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.  I never asked Gran about doctors, and her father was one, but my guess is they were included.  Chaperoning was an industry and reasion de etre for countless mature females.  The Victorians were at least partially right, if virginity is the object of life, because the instinct in the male is very often, all classes, all races, extreme; I mean, watch bears or stallions fighting and it will give you some idea.  The atavistic nature of the physical side of it also strongly affects the psychological side of the situation.  In other words, at least subliminally, it’s likely your dad thought that your wanting to zip the bags together and cuddle was provocative.  It is very hard for men, and if you’ve read much Agatha Christie you’ll know this, to get certain things through their heads, paramount among them, the notion that girls don’t want it to happen as much as they do.  Of course, many girls do, and that complicates things tenfold.  

	It would be interesting to take your case to an experienced trial judge and see what he or she had to say.  Yes, he raped you from the first touch of his penis against your bare thighs until he’d ejaculated on your hands and stomach and then went back to sleep.  It’s a permanent condition.  You will, to your dying day, have been raped in the eyes of every law of every land, civil and barbaric.  Yes what would a judge who’s seen hundreds or maybe even a thousand such cases over a long career say?  He’d probably, in a hearing, try to determine the maliciousness of the event and the degree of intent behind it.  He or she, in their career, have dealt, undoubtedly, with many instances were a moment’s inattention at the wheel of a car resulted in calamity that makes what happened to you seem like a mosquito bite in comparison; children burning alive, to be graphic.  This is much of what I try to accomplish in my writing.  Preaching, if you want to call it that (which would be a sacrilege to any organized church and perhaps the one time they agreed with each other in a millennia), perspective.  I believe in one story I pointed out the relevant fact that boys, and some girls, willingly step into the boxing ring with other and pummel away, both receiving and inflicting pain for their efforts.  This of course would apply more to the victims of outright rape than the technical, or legal, rape committed by your dad.  As far as the psychology goes, let me tell you this story.  I once gave CPR to a heart-attack victim.  I hadn’t been trained, and, in the emergency – he was dead as the proverbial doorknob – blew into his mouth much too hard, figuring to get as much air as possible into his lungs.  What happens in a case like that about defines graphic, so read slowly with your eyes squinched half shut.  Okay, ready?  He, a seventy year old man, vomited into my mouth.  Okay?  If that isn’t an invasion, then there is no such thing.  To be honest about it, you pretty obviously want to be a writer, at least as a hobby for the Internet; okay, extremes are the borders you’ll be dealing with, and lying awake for hours slick with your father’s semen, confused and scared, is an extreme.  Knowing them, and knowing them to be survivable, is part of what gives you the very abnormal level of self-confidence it takes to spend much of your life at a keyboard, knowing people will want to read what you have to say.  Now don’t go cutting off ears or burning the cats, because that’s like these morons out looking for pre-packaged extremes like structure jumping or rock climbing.  They’re nothing but entertainment for trolleys without wheels, and enough come your way without paying for experiences.  It’s simpler.  Having survived one with, as far as I can tell, flying colors, you need be – reasonably – less afraid of others.  Much of this, of course, you’ve gotten already, and will continue to get, from reading.  A good example is Ernest Shakelton, one of my boyhood heroes.  As many extremes as you can find in almost any man’s life.  On the one hand,  a dangerous lunatic sailing a flat-sided ship into dense pack ice, on another hand, a bullying bum who exploited his underlings unmercifully while living high on the hog, himself, and, on the third hand, something of a hero for his march across South Georgia Island.  He serviced dowagers in furtherance of his meaningless cause and brainwashed simple men with a dime’s worth of charisma.  He survived because of the genuine heroism of his ship’s captain and the boson of the “Endurance” who worked instead of talking.  He is famous because of the heroism of the photographer who recorded the destruction of his ship, his lunatic effort to shove heavy whale boats across three hundred miles of badly ridged ice – they made four miles in seven days – and carried  the movie film safely back to civilization.

	All this is to say that I’m sorry your first experience wasn’t on a bed of lilacs with an adored partner, but the reality of what happened seems to have kicked you into gear, not that you needed it, and given a focus to your life that otherwise would not exist.  My hope is that this plays out for you tolerably well over the long haul, because that’s what life is all about; the wearing of mountains down to molehills.  I’m sure you have other things to do, so I’ll let you go.


E. to T.


	I had other things to do, but you were spot on about our housekeeping, so they can wait.  I’d rather write to my prickly artist friend.  Extremes as the borders of perspective.  That’s so much in a nutshell, but it’s so accurate.  Waiting for the dawn.  But yes, the sun did rise, and it was a day pretty much like any other, at least until I read your story on the laptop – and that was bad of me, oops, I’ll tell you in a minute – and was suddenly facing to extremes at the same time.  How you pictured what happened between father and daughter, and how I felt after that long night.  Now the oops thing.  It was bad of me because I rigged the video at home to spy on him so I could get his password.  So there was another extreme; that I shouldn’t have been in the file, in the first place.  Sneak thief, rape victim, and porn reader.  Pretty good for a twelve year old, don’t you think?

	It’s been three days now, since that night, and jeez, we are bucketing along kinda, aren’t we.  My counter says 6,007 words.  The vacuum will last forever at this rate.  But, wow, hey, I’m a kid, I can say it, I like writing to you and reading what you send me.  Even about socks.  It reminded my of that PBS series about the family they got – I think it was BBC – to live exactly as a family of a hundred years ago.  They hated every minute of it, wanted to violate their contract and quit.  I try to imagine washing, drying, and ironing one of those fabric fortresses they called dresses, and my blood runs cold.  And where did they dry them?  In foggy, wet London?  In the city?  You’d think every house would have rotted to bits just from always being wet most of the time.  But that, too, was a time of extremes.  If you were at all well-to-do the mistress of the household could farm out all the work to servants and sip tea or laudanum all day, you know, if the gin ran low.  We have a big pressure cooker and two microwave ovens.  Mom and I can cook enough food for the week in two hours on Sunday.  Dad says we pay for our trips to Mexico because we know how to make rice and bean based meals that we can eat every day, just like they do, without getting tired of them – you know, jalapenos.   Laundry is a none issue, too.  I’ll bet we don’t spend ten girl hours a week on domestic stuff, and, if we’re not house-proud, we don’t live crummy, either.

	By this time what happened that night really is beginning to fade.  You’ve helped, but, you know, kids are curious, and that’s beginning to be my feeling, now.  Was he awake?  What did his sperm look like?  Was he thinking I was Mom?  Has he ever done anything like that with my brothers when he took them camping?  If I’d known what was happening, and guided him inside me instead of trying to push him back, would I be pregnant now?  What if I was?  That kind of thing.  

	One thing I should explain is that we home school.  Since we started with phonics and the multiplication tables when I was three and the boys were four or five, we’ve passed all the high school tests and have our GEDs.  Pretty funny, eh, because they’re meant for kids who are trying to catch up.  Anyway, Dad thinks it’s great that I’m practicing my typing so much so there’s no flak on the academic front.  I just worry about eating up your time.


T. to E.

       As I said, this is for publication on Nifty, so you’re not using my time but rather creating it, and extremely well, I might add.  And you’re right, the word count is soaring.  The accepted record, by the way, is D.H. Lawrence writing the hodgepodge called “Women in Love” at the rate of three thousand words a day.  This brings up an interesting technical point.  Okay, he probably wrote with a pen, perhaps a typewriter, but he had an editor.  We use word processors, but have to review and proof our own copy.  Which is more efficient?  Of course, having a word processor – and – and editor would be kinda trick, but if it’s a choice of one or the other, I’ll take “Word” and with a million thanks.  You may have seen this before, if you’ve been reading my work, but the great secret of the word processor is not that it allows you to work efficiently on a particular manuscript, but that it allows you to practice free of charge, assuming you have a computer to begin with.  I wrote my first novel on the traditional Royal portable, and it cost in the hundreds of dollars for ribbons, repairs, paper, carbons, and mostly correcting tape, because I may rattle along to beat the band, but I make lots of mistakes.  The same exact thing is true of digital photography.  Once you have the equipment you can take thousands of dollars worth of pictures for a few nickels worth of electricity, so you can practice.  And writing takes practice.  In my case, an easy hundred thousand hours over forty years, and probably half of that is actually typing out scripts, the other half more intellectual.  
       
       My guess is you have ten to twenty times the talent I did at your age, maybe more.  But it’s a false scent, the talent part.  A candle made for snuffing.  The number of one-trick wonders out there, Eric Segal, with “Love Story”, for example, or Ken Kesey with “…Cuckoo’s Nest”, is enough to send a smart person into bookkeeping rather than book writing.  Live, read, and practice, in any order you choose, as long as in nearly equal amounts.  Substituting a natural gift for any of the three is, indeed, a shortcut, but, not to overly diddle with the language, one that may cut short.  In fact, I hate praising you for fear of locking you in place – oh, he says I’m great, how ‘bout that? – and, as Archie used to say, “stifling” your development.  Yes, you have gotten off to an extraordinary start, partly, I think, because you were mad when you first wrote and just went at it, no mental convolutions involved, and certainly with no lack of confidence.  But the long-ball’s the thing.  Yes, again, bunting is useful, hitting for average, base running, athletic smarts including the ability to fake convincingly, but it’s the five hundred foot rope that’s it in this game, because it’s not baseball, it’s writing, and huge numbers of people can do a thoroughly competent and reasonably well crafted job of it; letters to the editor, newsletters, that kind of thing, ah, but can they get their second wind at a hundred thousand words and double that number before they type The End?  The power players are the advertising dudes with billions in commerce riding on a cute thought or nifty squib.  “What’s in your wallet?” is one of those distillations that make even an Einstein of long novel, short novel, long short story, and short short story shudder with envy, the writer, almost surely male, I’m afraid, making more off four words  than I’d make of four million, even if I wrote for print.
       
       Writing for Nifty is the archetypal case in point.  In fact, before beginning this evening’s stint, in other words, five minutes ago, I get confirmation from David, my editor, reading a terse: “I’ve added this story to the Bi Adult/Young Friends section of the Archive, Thanks, Nifty” as sum reward and pat on the back for “Poet of Phu Bai”, the jewel in my literary crown and hands-down the greatest novel ever published.  Nor will I get letter one.  Yet even had I the ego of a four-legged ant, I’d be thrilled because that story will be out there, literally, forever, as long as “ever” is measured against a civilized baseline.  In the end, millions will read it, and that, as I said, is a thrill, a thrill, and a thrill and a half.  Like the sign in many a cubical says, “You don’t have to be crazy to do this, but it helps.”
       
       From opening riff to stunning triple conclusion, “Poet” is a mesmerizing phantasm of literary and erotic perfection.  Tight, at under seventy thousand words, but loaded like McVeigh’s Ryder.  Much of it true as god’s green apples.  And if you think my ego runs rampant here, get a load of me, as hero of the condensed epic, winning two Medals of Honors and two Oscars on consecutive days.  It makes me so much greater than Christ with his little drummer boy weeping because he has no gift for The Presence.  No, not so much as a “pum” for me, much less a “rum-pa-pa-pum”.  What I’m giving you here, dear Erica, is an object lesson in, a, what it takes, and, b, how you do it.  Unmitigated gall based on decades of reading, living, and practice, not ego, and turning lemons, as with the phlebitis, into lemonade – i.e., double-timing the very lack of friendly response right into the word count.  Same deal with ego.  Gut too much?  Add it to the sacred count.  
       You have started in the same manner, your dad’s semen all over your innocent tummy.  Something apparently traumatic happened and there you were, a huddled, and perhaps slightly soggy ball of misery, and suddenly your immortal, your story bound for a red hot archive where it will live until the end of modern time.  Good girl, now go for it.
       
       How are things with your dad, now?  Have your mom or brothers responded in any notable way?  What’s next for you?  Life back to normal, no harm no foul, or is their a tendril of longing or yearning in you, an insidious, subconscious rubbing of fire sticks?
       
       Let me tell you something.  For three years I drove a city bus in Los Angeles.  Erica, I could tell an incest victim from half a block; stiff, robotic, detached, and this included women in their fifties.  Bent and crippled, maimed and tarnished, hollow and wishing for death.  Try not to be one, for the toll society exacts for what is essentially a physical act, perhaps somewhat painful, with its spooky, taboo fetishes is a life denying toll.  Feminist lit. goes on and on about the insult of the assault, the degradation, the invasion of privacy – television, books, movies, it’s always exactly the same mimeographed copy.  In the Jew’s box of publishing labeled “sex with dad,” you can be naught but a one hundred percent victim because that’s what the label on the box says   They ran the Weimar Republic, they ran the Bolsheviks, and now, duh’uh, they’re running us.  A good example is the film “Bad Boys”.  The little black boy is thrown to his death from a walkway, and the adorable, glib Jewish runs an empire from his cell, none of the hardened convicts apparently interested in seeing him so much as barefooted.   “Chinatown” is another distortion.  Again, duh’uh, the bad-daddy is hairy, heavy, old, and nasty.  Same thing in the movie where the guy has all the videos set up in his apartment building; the “step father” is ditto, ditto, ditto and ditto.  A very unhealthy box.  Conversely, never have you seen “Wicked William and Wild Wanda” with a thirty year old Patrick Swayze playing across from a ten year old Haley Mills; what happened in their camping tent of a summer night.  As you get older, this will all make sense, should you go on with choosing not to be a victim; nothing is said against incest between and attractive, committed father and daughter or brother and sister.  Thus, to a young mind, it is all sickness, and only sickness, because they haven’t the maturity to gain perspective from what is not actually produced for the commercial audience.
       
       I rank myself as a heterosexual pedophile.  The sight of even young, attractive bearded males kissing softly at a Vermont wedding brings a visceral reaction, and for long seconds I’m as homophobic as the boys in Wyoming.  (Without the beards, it would be merely highly objectionable, but in my view facial hair is ninety eight percent repulsive, both physically and psychologically.  I am joined by many, many millions in this.  Let me add this, since you mentioned your dad looks like Rick Schroeder.  I used him extensively, certainly more than any other writer, in “One Fish at a Time” (don’t happened to know where it’s posted on Nifty), and, yes, if he invited me to shower with him, I would, but that’s pretty much it in the homo department.  Tom Cruise to Rock Hudson, very few Hollywood guys are sexy at much more than a shop-girl level, but that goes for the girls, too.  In fact the only two actresses who knock me out are the girl who plays Mavis Multurd in the BBC comedy, “Are You Being Served, Again,” and Kate Thompson, who played the teacher in the absolutely ethereal and total-genius film, “The Gods Must be Crazy.”  The rest tend to be for “Playboy” readers, bland, glossy, and dumb.
       
       This brings up children.  The odds are better, for one thing; about one kid in twenty or thirty has at least a vague appeal, and a few in some hundreds have strong allure.  To an amazing extent this is psychological; how interesting would they be as friends and companions, the svelte, tawny, smooth, soft bodies amounting to a titillation rather than any degree of compulsion.  It is my belief that among literate, artistic people, my tastes in human flesh are stereotypical.   The lucky thing is, so many millions of accomplished men share them, they built, as I repeat in my various stories, the monastery system, crewed the navies, and built the foundation of the Internet.  Life would not be the same without us, and I mean that looking at the top one tenth of the pyramid.
       
       I’m glad to hear you’re home schooling.  They’re dangerous places with their know-it-all tradeunionist teachers.  They’ll have you read Salinger, pure poison, and Golding, and Kafka, and Nabakov, and Horrible Hemingway; kill you right out as reader and writer.  Again, The Box of literary greats.
       
       I hope we are a we now, because we’re doing great.  I have nothing optimistic to say about the future, and, indeed, there’s a possibility we’re as far from 2050 as 1903 was from 1950, in which case you’ve got a sleigh ride ahead.  On the other hand, the difference between 1050, in which year I was four years old, and today, amount, computers definitely excepted, to color television and no lube jobs for the family buggy.  Everything else in incremental, slightly better this and little cheaper that, in terms of domestic items, polyester, as mentioned previously, probably the fundamental good-guy.  Unfortunately, that’s not the entire then-&-now scene.  The entire scene is the destruction of six thousand American home towns, the finest in the world, by the Kresges, Waltons, and Krocs.  This is the greatest disaster in the history of civilization, but broke no significant laws.  Under such a system you live, Erica, one that would imprison your dad for twenty years if you reported it, and one in which you’ll experience the dignity and beauty of a classic American home town with its awnings and picture windows only at Disneyworld.  
       
       Those circling the drain can be excused for living for the moment if anyone can.  What was the last night at Masada really like?  Were the children put down with a crack to be back of the head, or finally killed after a night of use by their killers?  Something to ponder on your next trip to Starbucks.
       
       A short life in a gilded cage.  But remember, I can be laughed out of town, made a fool and idiotic poltroon, but, the only trouble is, by readers fifty years from now, who, living in some semblance of what we have today, will know my fears were groundless and my worries baseless.  Except at the toy level, we have not advanced in the half century of my life.  I view it as the pause before the fall.
       
       Again, extremes and perspective.  Already, at twelve, you have lived a million lifetimes compared to your great grandmother at your same age.  Generally speaking, present company excluded, the real horror of your generation is its ignorance, its ambivalence, and its total lack of appreciation for what you have, so far beyond the wildest dreams of anyone a snap of the fingers ago.  I first saw “Jaws” in a big theater in Boston.  The screams of the audience, sometimes two or three breaths long, crashed and sizzled through the auditorium.  Today you see it, nineteen inches, sitting in your cold diapers sucking on a lollypop.  I don’t relate the two experiences to each other beyond saying one was fully human and the other is not.
       
       Your turn.  What’s happening with you and your dad, mom, and brothers?  David, my non-editing editor at Nifty may be laconic to the point of being phlegmatic, but he has a dead eye for what’s hot and what’s not.  Hint, hint.
       
       
E. to T.


	Two days.  Sorry.  Hope you didn’t think I’ll slept with the pills or anything dramatic.  I should add: Your Highness, because the reason I’ve delayed writing is I’ve been reading.  I’d like to turn the tables on you by parroting one of your little reader’s quizzes, but the answer to What has Erica been reading is such a duh’uh, you’d guess – as you already have.

	I got caught out.  I was laughing so hard at Daffy Duck mooing and sinking, Dad had to get to the bottom of it.  Tom, we read it together, and you can tell David not – to – worry.
       
       But first I want to say it is the greatest of all novels, impossibly great, yes, the work of a god.  It crashes and storms the senses, and then along comes a sex scene, and if it’s not that, back to laughing out loud, sorely needed comic relief, ‘cause next thing you know Thor and Mars are hacking it out.  Never, if I live to be a hundred, will I look at a can of Coke again without picturing that quaking helo smashing itself to pieces and tearing young men to pieces.  At the same time it’s the most compelling delineation of good and evil, truth and honor, fit and unfit of all time.  Cannot be exceeded.  Wow, wow, and wow again from me, from dad, from mom, and from Del, Mack, and Scott.
       
       One note.  I was flattered by the edited version of my letters which you attached to your last e-mail.  You changed nothing but managed to spruce me up, maybe like a champion hairdresser.  Thanks.  Folks, I do not write this well, just so you’ll know, but knowing I have the gods on my side, I carry on as I see fit, relying on their (his) benevolence.
       
       “You haven’t laughed for days, sweetie, what’s so funny?” Ryan Jensen asked his twelve year old daughter, Erica.
       
       “I guess I’m glad you’re here, Dad,” the girl replied, “because I wanted to talk about stuff and show you some files.  I didn’t know how to go about it, but if I can sit in your lap while we read this story, it would make it easier than any introduction I can think of to a father/daughter talk.”
       “I’m not sure about the lap thing, hon,” the thirty two year old accountant said, “but I’d love to read something with you.  In fact, we’ve missed you in the living room these last few evenings, but I let it go because I could hear you clicking away in your room and there’s no substitute for being able to type.”
       “That part comes later,” the girl said, “and I want to sit in your lap, at least for awhile. Please?”
       
       “Well, sure,” Ryan said, easing into the chair as Erica stood, then whoofing as she dropped, thump, in his lap, tilting the monitor slightly so each would have a comfortable view of the scrolling text.  She returned to the top of the document, rereading as avidly as she had on her father read.
       “Where did you find this?” the man asked, a mere five paragraphs in.
       “You’ll figure that out soon enough,” the girl said with a soft laugh, and they read on.  A minute or two went by.  “My god,” Ryan whispered, “it’s Nifty.  It’s [and here he named the author].  Oh, baby.”
       “Keep reading,” the pixie instructed, bouncing in her handsome father’s lap to emphasize her directive.  And read they did for first one hour, then two, shifting their positions slightly, taking turns with the scrolling mouse, and finally sagging back in the chair, half exhausted but wholly entertained and feeling nothing less than that they had received absolution.
       
       “I guess we have a few extremes of our own to deal with,” Ryan said, because the girl followed the intense novel with the opening of her exchange of letters with the writer.
       “And contradictions, too,” Erica said, “in my case, an extreme of negativity resulting from a positive action morphing into an extreme of said negativity in the absence of future positive actions, positive defined as something physical that happens, not a value judgment.”
       
       “I wonder,” Ryan mused, trying to keep up with his daughter, “if there’s an opposite to the Pennsylvania babies; neglected infants who grow up without human characteristics; in other words, if a child is overly cared for, mightn’t she grow up so literate and articulate her own father will have a hard time following her logic.”  He punched her lightly on the shoulder to let his daughter know that he was half kidding.  “Beyond prodigy,” he mused to himself, but how did it bode?  If you ate the world as a cracker, all its intellectual harum-scarum as a peanut, wouldn’t it create a thirst for common things?  Common talk?  Common ideas?  The vaulting stuff of yore, well, it was all contaminated with religion and cultist ideology and amounted to nothing more than a prism bending and separating the rays of indoctrination into different hues and shades, but with the same corrupt source.  It was for its own cleverness, its lauded practitioners merely the glibbest of the counterfeiters.  Where was a child like this to turn?  To apply her prodigious questing for insight?  What would be her luck at finding a true ray, an uncorrupted source, and, ideally, use the light, grow from the light, but understand that the light was the truth and not try to bend it?  Would two prisms, properly aligned with each other, bend, use, and then restore the spectrum?  The thoughts had a parallel in his own field, accounting.  Could an executive embezzle, make use of the funds, then restore them as if he hadn’t touched them in the first place, adding, from his own pocket, even the few dollars of interest that might have been earned by the purloined amount over a brief period of time?  In theory, yes, but had anyone ever actually done it, paid for his kid’s operation, to use a possible motivation, restored the money in six months, and escaped detection in a future audit?  Never mind the morality, concentrate on the physics; the underlying laws of mathematics, possibly leaving out only those concerning gravity, hard to see how they’d matter.  Could they deviate and restore?  Scientifically, the answer was Of course not.  A ship, for example, piloted even  a theoretical inch off course will use part of a theoretical gram more fuel in reaching point B.  That didn’t help much and indeed over-measuring was perhaps even nuclear to the issue, her, him, them worrying about straying to the point the emotion became the issue, not the activity.  That was beginning to make sense, but it’s converse, to exercise extentionist philosophy, was the rationalizations of the libertine, the philanderer and the good old-fashioned cocksmith.  “You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a women’s man, no time to talk.”  What did that have to do with stayin’ alive?  Would Little Erica love that shit?  Could such a girl, once upon the slickest of slopes, again mellow out to Abba, or would she jitter, bugged into an obsession with and addiction to the novel, for its own sake?  Nothin’ weren’t nothin’ lessen it were new?  True?  Devilish, because it was half true, and partly proved by contrasting it to the misery generated by Jews, often as a direct result, as delineated in “The Jazz Singer”, of the abhorrence of anything “new”.
       
       “Do you want to start at the tent?” the athletic young man asked.
       “Do you remember?” was her first question.
       “No,” her father said, “not a glimmer.  “Your mom, since we’re going to be speaking as adult for the duration, says that’s happened before, you know, something in the middle of the night.  Not to be glib, or anything, but she wasn’t trying to push me away.  I never remember it any more than one remembers most dreams, but a couple of times she’s shown me a damp nightie, and I never had reason to doubt her in the first place.”
       “I’ll be it makes her glad she married you,” the girl responded.
       “You’re a love to say that,” her dad said with a hug, “but she couldn’t feel that any more than I feel glad to have her.”
       “Obviously,” the child giggled.
       “It sure is good to hear you laugh again, sweetie,” Ryan said.  “I suppose I should have put two and two together after that night; realized something must have happened and tried to talk to you, you know, because you seemed sort of morose and withdrawn the next day, but it never occurred to me that it was anything more than a transient case of the blues or some-such.”
       
       
       Hi, it’s me.  Is that okay for a beginning?  Will people want to hear more?  Remember what you said about stroking young writers, freezing them, and be honest.
       
       Other subjects:  First:  Dad and I both think it’s the extent to which we’ve all become Jewish – superficial and materialistic – boxed in – that’s the abiding danger.  The theory of the lowest common denominator, as presented by Mencken and a raft of others, with everyone wanting to be equal to us, yet, in the true scheme of things, fit far more to shine our shoes and drive our taxicabs.  We engulf in the name of smarm, and to keep us from harm, need a king’s arm.  That’s the Poet of Daytona Beach, and I’ll spare you and our future millions any more, at least for the moment.
       
       Yes, I take us as partners, flattered to my toenails, for better or worse, and so on, and as long as you keep writing, I will.  By the way, Dad says our family portfolio has, market conditions notwithstanding, reached thirty two million dollars, which Dad says is awkward because it’s not conveniently divisible by four if he pulls an Earnhardt  on the freeway.  Maybe that’s what calculators were invented for.  Living cheaply – pays.  Boy, if you can get that across to your readers it would be really something.  Of course dad’s a wizard at picking other things than mom, so let’s not get people’s hopes too high.  He’s frozen out our account, as he calls it, selling off anything speculative and replacing it with government securities – the last dollars they’ll be, not that it makes any difference (in his words) – and he doesn’t want us to continue school unless we have a specific reason for wanting to do so, and one to do with math, not the soft stuff you can learn in the comfort and company of your own home, like history, you know, partly thanks to the Net, and he doesn’t want us to work, because he feels those who don’t have to should leave paying jobs to those who do.  It’s okay to be artists and to patronize the arts.  “That’s what we’re here for,” he says, the old hypocrite, because he’s still outta here at eight every morning and sometimes doesn’t get home ‘till eight.  But I’ve got my work cut out for me in spite of his injunction.  Guess why.  Do one of your cute little reader quizzes and see if you can get the folks to guess why Erica has her work cut out for her.  Tell them to be wildly optimistic, over the top, over the moon, and they’ll hit the nail on the head.  Okay, enough, you know, it’s not a thing to overdo.  Erica Jensen has her work as a neophyte writer cut out for her ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, because, drum roll, she’s, add ruffles and flourishes, going, that’s where the herald comes in: camping with her dad!
       
       We’re taking El Fabuloso, the laptop, (my feelings about it certainly run the gamut of extremes), so there shouldn’t be any long, mysterious interruptions.  Kiss me.  By the way (I think I already said that), if you want to fantasize about what happens on the trail, I’m not some beauty queen.  I’m five feet tall and weigh ninety one pounds, and, if I look like an actress, its Mackenzie Phillips in ”American Graffiti”.  
       
       I have an idea, you know, a literary one.  Why don’t you write what you think happens as a Schroeder and Phillips look-alikes go camping, and I’ll write what actually happens.  We’re leaving tomorrow morning, so, ‘till next time, you’ll be pretty right picturing me Sleepless just outside Daytona Beach.  And one last b-t-w: if you want money for anything, dad says we can split it from our accounts.  You’d like my mom, too.  See ya. 
       
       
T. to E.
       
       
       You rank with Samantha as a total reward for every last minute of the gulag labor it took to get where I am.
       
       No thanks to the loot.  Seven of us live on twenty-five grand a year, and that keeps the domestic side of things in sharp focus at all times.  I need some relief from the keyboard syndrome, and, since Linden, Samantha’s oldest brother, ruined my camera, nursing out dollars has taken its place as an alternate avocation.   For all the bombast about king and literary angel, I like being poor.  I would trade neither Samantha or you for the Gates and Walton fortunes, combined.  I actually need to bucket into town on rough roads in rickety cars.  I need seeing the faces of Elston and Tonton, the two boys living downstairs, get bigger because they are going hungry.  Total, day-to-day connection.  It’s the minerals and trace elements that make me what I am.  Perhaps because I was hit so hard, so often, by my mother I need higher levels of intensity than are deemed normal, I don’t know.  In any event, it’s one exceedingly lucky day after another, and tempting that with your kind offer, well, let’s just say I’m happy with what I’ve got.
       
       Thank you for reminding me of Daffy Duck.  If I have one frustration in life it’s not being able to simply say what things (my stories) are, without being taken as the very mother of all  braying jackasses.  There is sketched the most monumentally memorable character in the English language.  She illustrates what the written word can do: imagine trying to get those scenes across on film.  Unstagaeble   And yet there she is, leading off the most stageable screenplay ever written.  More of our dear old extremes.
       
       We’re over ten thousand words in three days.  Epic of you.  Fantastic.  You give too much credit for polishing up your work; it would stand as mailed, but I just can’t help myself.  Thank you for making it more of a joy than it was.
       
       Your idea of a mutual titillation society is – duh’uh – perfect.  It woozes my mind to know, if you don’t get snake bit or something, you’ll be returning to three older brothers…  meantime….
       
       
       “Daddy,” the girl said as they paused to sit on a boulder, a comfortable five miles of quiet meandering over pasturelands behind them, “why was there so much sperm?  I mean, I never really thought about it, but I guess, since there are so many swimming in each drop of semen, a drop or two would do.  But it just went on and on, pumping all over me for more than a minute.”
       “Well,” Ryan said, “if you think of it from a bean counter’s perspective, maybe the reason goes something like this: it’s a great pleasure for a male to release it, to cum off, and the more semen there is, the greater and more extended the intense feelings of a climax.  If this is true, then over the millennia, a little Darwinism might kick in: males the most, you know, active in that department would be more likely to leave children in females than males who experienced a lesser intensity during the process of impregnation.  Something like that.”
       “That’s what scared me,” Erica responded.  “I mean you read about people bleeding to death, and what was happening kept going on and on.”
       “Darling,” the young father whispered, “it will tonight, too.  By chance your mom and I haven’t made love for the last three nights; in fact, what happened in the tent three nights ago, well, that was the last time it happened, and that time, to tell you the whole story, I’d made love to your beautiful mother the night before.”
       “Oh, Daddy,” the girl whispered, and they sat closely together for more minutes than their young bodies needed to recover from hiking in the flatlands of Florida.
       
       “Sweetheart,” Ryan said, “I have a little more to say on the subject.  Two nights, it was coincidence we, your mom and I, didn’t make love.  Last night, it was deliberate.  I told her about, first, my Nifty files on the laptop, and second, about what happened in the tent.  Her response was to the affect that I seem to have done an okay job as a family man, so far, and then she thought for a few minutes.  ‘How would you feel about not using protection with her?’ she whispered.  The implications – you know, so beloved of an accountant – took awhile to seep in, but it was a pretty fiery moment for your old dad when they hit home.  Do you get the picture, darling?”
       The schoolgirl chewed her lip for a moment.  “You don’t have to be an accountant to know what might happen between us if we’re completely naked when it happens.  I’m old enough.  My first period was two weeks ago, and I’m a hundred percent not on the pill.  Your daughter and granddaughter, my daughter and sister.  Mom’s granddaughter.  Wouldn’t that be a family tree like a natural tree, curves instead of straight lines?” she concluded with a giggle.
       “They say these latest computers can figure out darn near anything,” Ryan replied.  They continued sitting on the limestone outcropping.
       “Yes,” Erica finally said.  “We’re home people, anyway, you know, with school and all, and we’re long overdue for something like a European excursion, the kind families sometimes make to adopt a child.  And the girl – that’s the only thing I insist on, now that it can be programmed – would have three adorable uncles to bath her, starting at age three, when I wouldn’t have minded at all if things had happened in the tub with your or my brothers, if I’d known what was going on.”
       
       “You’re so totally your mother’s daughter,” Ryan said, “and I honestly don’t know if that makes it feel more or less like incest.”
       “Well, it doesn’t feel human,” the twelve year old said, “it feels like more than fairy tales coming true, like they did for Evanna, or Madonna’s Evita.  A magic land.  Beyond reality.  And another stipulation.  Mom gets pregnant, too.  I’ve seen the boys looking at her like she’s a woman, and even if they only have a quarter as much sperm as you do, one of them might do the trick; and, think how cool; with DNA, we’d know who fathered each of us, so there’s be come clarity in the family tree.”
       “As a top-of-my-field accountant,” Ryan said, “I give you five gold stars for driving a hard bargain.”
       
       
       Erica, as you know a branch of my self indulgence as a writer, since you mentioned trees, is going off on editorial tangents.  Since you and your dad are getting along so famously, it might be an idea to take a little break as intense doses of fiction age me out.  One thing I wanted to say, and this is to do with writing, is that my favorite author is John O’Hara – short stories, only.  He rates fairly lowly on any literary who’s who, and I think it was because he was always seeking recognition.  He came from a very different class and background than I do, but I wonder if we don’t share a common instinct: seeking recognition knowing that by doing so it will be denied us, ergo, leaving us more time to write.  What I’m talking about here is the sleep-cycle necessary to make the grade in fiction; how easily it can be interrupted, yet how fundamentally crucial it is to productivity.  I can not turn on the computer until I’m totally rested.  A sort of “hark” feeling you get – and it’s weird, because it happens in an instant – when bed is suddenly the last place you want to be.  I roll with the punches on domestic stuff; had ten visitors before starting work this evening, but napping here and there, managed to get in twenty or thirty winks, which, since I’m writing to you (and it helps) was enough.  Anything that significantly interrupted this pattern, and the demands of renown certainly would top the list, would spoil the pattern, and my output would zero-out in a heartbeat.  It’s a vague, not a precise thing, at the same time being absolute, if that isn’t too much of a paradox.  I spell it out, because, along with the bed and typing skill, it’s at least possibly of great significance to other writers and potential writers.  Start absolutely fresh.  That’s it in a nutshell.  Start fresh and I, almost sixty, can go on for an easy ten to twelve hours buoyed along by, you guessed it, the dynamic start.  (The reason I now stop after ten or twelve hours is that, lying down, my eyes get bleary – rheumy - , something you can put on your B-list of potential handicaps.)  All the writer advice I’ve read, and it hasn’t been much, says the opposite.  Set a time and a place, a routine, and, if you’re a writer, write, dammit.  As wrong as Iridium.  It would, again, neuter me overnight.  Just wanted to get that in reasonably early in the game as a note bene, or however you say “important note” in Latin.
       
       Here’s a for-instance, vis-à-vis the treatment of writers.  Look up the following films in “Encarta”: “The Gods Must be Crazy” and “American Graffiti”.  Read the articles.  Two points.  First, “A.G.” is editorially lauded, given in fact quite a spin, but, guess what?  No writer is mentioned, though the actress playing the third carhop is.  Second point, vis-à-vis H.L. Mencken: the editorial spin is not in the least in evidence in the piece on “Gods”.  
       
       Don’t get me wrong.  “American Graffiti” is an A-list film, but “The Gods Must be Crazy” is three times as good, and it’s reported in objective deadpan.  No Jews in it, could it be that simple?  It broke all attendance records – in the world – and it’s described in a flat cow flop of prose.  The scene of the constable reporting in after his shack has been smashed, standing rigidly at attention as he shouts the details into the telephone, is all the dignity, wit, charm, and humanity it is possible to capture in any medium, well, Daffy Duck perhaps excepted.   The scenes of trying to get the Land Rover through the gate are funnier, per ten seconds, are funnier than Mickey Mouse’s career, cubed.  The scene in the classroom is simply why I live as close as I can get, which happens to be Belize.
       
       Moving on to politics.  England.  Flap over possible over-reporting of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.  Gist of the writing: we went to war on false pretenses over a tempest in a teapot.  Gist of realty: the Looney Tune set seven hundred oil wells on fire and used poison gas.  I don’t think it gets more Jewish than that since Torah and Talmud teach forgetting arguments as readily, for coin or fame, as invoking them.  Barry Sheck forgot, for another example, a thousand times more than he used when he stigmatized Detective Van Adder for carrying O.J. blood sample in the pocket of his sport jacket.  We have had pages and pages of this scum, and, if we want even a hair’s breadth chance of survival, we must have pages without them.  Again, readers fifty years from now can call me clown and dufus, but meantime all bets are off as we wallow, like our favorite water buffalo, deeper and deeper in the cloying slime of this mongrel race.
       
       Since there are no less pleasant subjects, I’m pretty safe going on to, say, the crummy writing in Microsoft’s “Slate Magazine”  One piece was by a ying-yang who thought flying had something to do with getting an erection, and… I don’t know, couldn’t finish it.  The other was about a klutz on a fishing boat.  Generally, I’m on Gate’s side, and struggled epically with early Windows machines because I couldn’t afford a Mac, and it was better to struggle and publish than dither in obscurity, but I do take issue with his publishing “Encarta”, “Slate”, and “MSN” which is pretty much “USA Today”, you know: seven hints you are living vastly beyond your means and should kill yourself, that kind of article.  It’s like when actors like Newman and Redford try to direct: mush.  (God forbid they tried writing.)  Where the company’s emphasis should have been, instead, was in integrating effective virus protection starting in about 1990.  The federal government should have become involved, as they are in setting and enforcing standards for enriched flour, as one example, and mandated that the very manufacturers of hard drives install protective coding on the assembly line.  It’s the Fort Knox theory: guard it well, and no one will try to break in.  Good virus protection, beginning ten or twelve years ago, would have prevented script kiddies, in the first place, since their parents weren’t up to the task.  Instead, Microsoft was off into publishing while the government was fussing with them over Netscape.  A forest and trees issue.  But it brings up an interesting point, a true paradox, because, when you look back on it, in spite of the mortal danger represented by certain contemporary folkways to do with food, greed, credit, sub-literacy, and the like, we have managed to do very little wrong.  We have standardized railways, telephones, broadcasting, and video players.  In fact, only two major errors stick with me.  First, we should have built a railway through the Grand Canyon.  By tunneling, much of the waterway would have been left unchanged, and the base of the canyon is essentially a gravel pit, to begin with.  The result of not doing this is that only a few privileged people get to view the natural wonder (getting, into the bargain, ten times more than they ever wanted to see, on a good trip).  The second thing is burying most utility lines.  Putting them underground with the water, gas, and waste lines.  Utility poles turns thousands of minor incidents a year into shattering tragedies, are vulnerable to everything from ice to snakes, and cost only a fraction less than running a slit trench.  If the women of yore hand been of substance, that would have been their issue, not gibberish about voting, be able to sue each other, and carrying on in public  These two issues, by themselves, would render our country, at miniscule cost, thirty percent better than it is now (contemporary issues disregarded for the moment), and cracking the skull of every worker who ever muttered “unite” would add another thirty percent, at zero cost.  One small tragedy, and two huge ones.
       
       Having said that about “Encarta”, I have to admit I use it frequently.  How else would one know how to spell Mackenzie Phillips?  A little research goes a long way in this game.  Call that the hint of the day.  Having mentioned spelling, I should add a blurb about typos and glitches.  Kid, they just creep in.  I apologize for them every thousand pages or so, but there’s not much I can do about them.  It’s very difficult to proof one’s own work, and my at times highly convoluted style makes the job twice as tough.  The third factor is that in the time it takes to re-write a paragraph, fully proof it, I can write three new ones.  At my age, the latter seems like the best choice.  I had a reader once who did line-edit some of my stories, but they got lost in a virus attack and so the clean versions, at least grammatically, never got published.  An interesting tangent off this subject is a long-time associate who hails from Concord; our fathers were friends.  Good example of the flaky liberal.  First, he loves my work and sends enthusiastic fan mail, or at least he used to.  On the other hand, though he’s recipient of a substantial unearned income and doesn’t work or do squat, he refuses to edit my copy, off of some self-reliance jag, applied to me, sourced to my great great grandfather.  Again with the extremes.  He’s all Thoreau, all Emerson, but given the opportunity to help a living, breathing descendent (of both, by the way, because my great grandfather, Edward, called Henry David papa for many years (I look so much like RWE there can be  no biological base to the name)) he opts out and, though his life is a meaningless shell, writes condescending notes in such profusion I finally dumped his lazy, stupid ass with a Hiel Hitler.  Oddly enough, he suggested “Poet of Phu Bai” off of knowing Bing.  What drove a final wedge into the most tenuous of relationships, to begin with, is he kept trying to serve my own family up to me.  The arrogance of the liberal – moonbeam – can be nothing but funny.  He vaguely knows my family, has perhaps spent a minute with them to my hundreds of hours, yet he’s the expert and I the uncomprehending dolt.  Massively extreme, from an intellectual point of view, and the more so – I almost feel like inserting a reader guessing quiz here: why is his intellectual position so extreme.  Well, maybe another time.  Wouldn’t want the device to go stale.  Because, he’s a student of Harvard Divinity School.  Fuck.
       
       Yes, I’m as rough on my own kith and kin as on any Cohen running around loose, and yes, they deserve every word of it, as does Cohen.  Sunlight, hold the moonbeams for nocturnal interludes
       
       
       And it’s sunny in Florida, what else is new? as Ryan and Erica sit as if in half a trance on their improvised limestone stool.
       “In some of his stories, it happens kind of clinically, Dad,” the girl said, breaking the insecty silence.  “Just the physical act, itself, the first time, without kissing and foreplay and a lot of romantic stuff.”
       “I know,” Ryan responded, “but his characters often talk to each other in lieu of physical contact, and I was wondering how you might feel about that.”
       “We could try it and save the other stuff for the baby,” his daughter responded.
       “Erica,” Ryan want on, “I have a stipulation of my own.  I’m thinking as we go here, and it’s subject to revision, like a trial balance, but I think I want you to have a man.  One of my tennis partners, a colleague from work, a single guy who can visit and perhaps even live part time with us   The reason is largely psychological; growth oriented stuff mixed with self-esteem stuff, but there’s a clinical reason, too.  There is a lack of pheromones in an incestuous relationship – nature’s vague way of limiting inbreeding, I suppose – and you may not be able to climax fully with me or your brothers.  
       “If you sign on, and you don’t have to commit one way or the other, until you’re ready, I’ll parade a bunch of guys by you, unless you have one already in mind, and you can choose.”
       
       “Wow,” the child whispered.
       “It’s partly selfish,” the young father added.  “The only thing I can think of as exciting as talking with you now is being alone with you fresh from the loins of the proverbial tall, dark stranger.”
       “Daddy,” the child responded, letting a little coo into her sweet, shy voice, “if you pulled my panties down and saw I was still you know, messy, from him, would that be the same as pheromones?  As a male animal, wouldn’t you feel a strong instinct to wash the other’s males seed with your own hot sperm?”
       
       “Yes, angel,” Ryan whispered, “if you were messy from the outsider’s semen, that would be very exciting, but if you were wet from your brothers, it would be different.  I think when that happens I’ll want to put just the head of my penis inside you,  then cum just a little before I sprayed the rest on your belly; add my seed to theirs, instead of trying to replace it.”
       
       “We’d have to be very clinical for that to happen, wouldn’t we?” Erica wondered.
       “Careful as porcupines,” the man agreed, “but life sometimes provides compensations – the poor not having to worry about their portfolios, that kind of thing - so the very nature of a precise act might generate its own erotic excitement.”
       “So much to experiment with, so much time.  I’m glad I’m twelve,” the girl said.
       “As long as you remember that a stable structure diminishes as it rises,” Ryan observed, adding:  “if I had any doubt you’ll put it together correctly, in the end, we’d be talking about the butterflies and crickets, not the birds and the bees.”
       
       
       Don’t’ want to hog the bandwidth, so that’s the opening to my version of Erica and Ryan.  And bandwidth is not much to speak of, here.  Often less then 1.0Kps.  I think it’s the sequence of failures the French had in Guyana; something like six Ariens in a row that went wrong.  Kennedy had it exactly wrong, continuing on with things-we-failed-to-do.  His numbingly repeated challenge should have been for his grandchildren to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth.  It was nothing for the Sixties, merely an extension of the football-game mentality.  The list of things we should not have done is longer than the one of things we didn’t do, and, while nuclear submarines takes up the entire A-list, manned space flight is at the top of the next one.  Hold NASA’s collective feet to an oxygen enriched fire, and they couldn’t come up with a double-spaced page of practical results from the manned flight segment of the space program.  The only thing they’ve proved, utterly, is that the human body deteriorates very rapidly in a weightless environment, but, under prevailing logic (used sarcastically) they sell it to us as a Great Problem that will take Great Billions to solve.  Reversing the Mississippi is a rough equivalent, and at least we’d probably unearth a few ancient burial grounds if we tried that.
       
       Your turn, my daughter in absentia (or granddaughter, as the case may be.
       
       
ELECTRIC LETTERS – END FILE I
