FIRST INK
Gary Cadwallader

You sit down to write and it becomes an overwhelming challenge, an insuperable ego-bashing threat to your sanity as if everything you’ve ever thought has to be summed up in five-hundred words, two-thousand words. Good-god sixty-thousand! So you turn to your cult heroes: Palahniuk, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard. You say, “Gimme something, dammit. Gimme passion. Gimme mystery. Gimme God with barbeque sauce.”

And there it is in Hempel’s Weekend:

And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

Ah, beauty. Mizz Amy calls that “sentence-level writing.” It is writing you love. The act of writing, the gestures involved in the process, the final twist of the pen. You remember a Chinese painter you watched Saturday mornings on PBS. This was when you lived in LA with the dance student, the one with freckled thighs and when you stared at her legs it was like looking into a fawn colored universe.

The Chinese painter would say, “First you make a stroke. Everything after is a desperate attempt to justify that first act.”

Yes, yes! What else you got? There’s Mark Richard. He opens The Birds for Christmas this way:

We wanted "The Birds" for Christmas. We had seen the commercials for it on the television donated thirdhand by the Merchant Seamen's and Sailors' Rest Home, a big black-and-white Zenith of cracked plastic and no knobs, a dime stuck in the channel selector. You could adjust the picture and have no sound, or hi-fi sound and no picture. We just wanted the picture. We wanted to see "The Birds."

And later this, the justification:

"Fuck Frosty," Michael Christian said to me. "I see that a hunrett times. I want to see "The Birds," man. I want to see those birds get all up in them people's hair. That's some real Christmas TV to me."

Wonderful. You grab your copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby. There’s gotta be something in here! What are the themes? What keeps popping up over and over among these writers you so love?

Imperfect and messy, this is the world we live in. This far from God, these are the people I’m left with. Everybody grabbing for power. Mona and Helen and Nash and Oyster. The only people who know me hate me. We all hate each other. We all fear each other. The world is my enemy.

Crap. Not as subtle as Hempel, not as with it as Richard… still he’s the only one who understands God like you do:

Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages use to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat.

Do you ever wonder when God’s coming back with a lot of barbeque sauce?

So there you have the unvarnished truth about contemporary minimalism: it ain’t minimal. It’s about glossy surfaces, yes. Extraordinary events, yes. It’s about angst and passion, or lack of it. It’s about showing not telling, skipping third person. It is humorous and scatological. It’s Raymond Carver farting as he approaches the dais. It’s writing on the sentence level, for the love of words, for the sound of words—and without explanation. It is freeing the reader and yet confining him also, slowing her down with bizarre structures that cry out, “Oh read again, please.”

It’s a Chinese guy on PBS and a hammer-toed woman with dancer’s legs who pulls her skirt up when you enter the room. It's about not shaving and the way a pen feels in your hand. It's throwing something on the fire, knowing the barbecue sauce will arrive in time.

© Gary Cadwallader 2005

Gary Cadwallader (rmcheal2@aol.com) lives and works on a tiny horse ranch in West Central Missouri when he isn’t yeehawing through the slush as GSG’s flash wrangler. His expert flash fiction, has been published in Gator Springs Gazette, Smokelong Quarterly, Frigg, Lit Pot and a few print journals.

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