Transcript from a Garden to Window Conversation between Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous

From the recently recovered desk of Rick Vigorous:

----------

LENORE: You could have called instead -

RICK: I feel that the revelation of my pensees deserved a greater demonstration of -

LENORE: And you can stop throwing those rocks now. The last one hurt.

RICK: Sorry. I've just been...

LENORE: ...

RICK: ...

LENORE: Are you not going to finish that?

RICK: I think the ellipsis speaks louder than...

LENORE: You're doing it again.

RICK: Yes. Yes I am...

LENORE: Look, do you want to come inside instead of shouting?

RICK: I must confess that I prefer this scene. It adds a certain cachet to our reconciliation - don't you think?

LENORE: I don't know what that means. I don't really understand why you disappeared.

RICK: I'm afraid that I'm in love with you, Lenore.

LENORE: ...

RICK: It's tormenting me - tormenting me to the point where I begin to just write things without screening them.

LENORE: So the words impose their own form of -

RICK: No. I don't want to scare you with words that assert their own existence -

LENORE: Those words scared me. Why do you think you don't deserve me? I like being around you but -

RICK: I don't want you around me... or with me... I want you to be mine.

LENORE: It's that particular distinction that worries me.

VLAD: I do like Rick, Mindy, but sometimes I'm afraid he's going to show up outside my window, climb the walls, and slash me to ribbons!

LENORE: Sorry, my parrot has been talking a lot lately... sometimes he -

RICK: I forgot my knife at home.

LENORE:...

RICK: Not funny. You're right.

VLAD: How am I supposed to tell him about my family? About how completely warped everyone is? About how my father is testing advanced hormones on my parrot and is probably spying on Rick all the time - how my last boyfriend disappeared suddenly and still hasn't surfaced?

LENORE: Well I guess that's one way of finding out.

VLAD: Not to mention the fact that my father often playfully asks "have you heard from Dean lately?" - all but confessing that he made Dean disappear.

RICK: Goodnight, Lenore. See you in the office.

LENORE: Rick?

-----------

Literary Agent Application from Rex Young

Rick, I know you're out there. I thought this might cheer you up: the guy with the back to the future/freudian manuscript applied for the job posting you put out on the blog.

-----

To: Lenore Beadsman
From: Rex Young
Re: Literary Agent Position

“I’m your density.”
(George McFly. Back to the Future. 1985.)

Reasons why you should hire me:
1. I have an excellent sense of epigrammatic humor.
2. I can quote Back to the Future (I, II and III) better than any of the other eligible bachelors working at F+V.
3. “A flying DeLorean? What the hell is going on here?”
4. (Biff Tannen. Back to the Future II. 1989.)
5. I have never experienced impotence.
6. I have never experienced impotence.
7. I deserve to have you
8. as a co-worker.
9. I can bench-press 275 lbs
10. while writing a sonnet
11. about your wine-blue eyes.
12. I can write poetry
13. while pretending to write a job application.
14. I can write poetry
15. that secretly tells a woman
16. named Lenore
17. that I love her
18. even though I’m married
19. to a really beautiful woman—
20. a beautiful woman that doesn’t deserve
21. my secret poetry;
22. But you
23. deserve more than poetry;
24. You deserve
25. a poet
26. who will also work diligently at whatever tasks F+V Publications assigns to him.
27. I have never experienced impotence and,
28. “I want you to know that I care about you deeply.”
29. (Doc Brown. Back to the Future III. 1990.)
30. Call me.

----------

Sure, it creeps me out a little bit, but ever since I started at this firm that has sort of become the norm. They're just words on a page, right? How dangerous could they be?

Consider:

How to begin to come to some understanding of one's place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time?

---

DFW, The Broom of the System

Rick...

I'm worried about you. You're reading this, aren't you? Please call soon.

-L

Pensées

From the self-effacing, psychologically-naked desk of Rick Vigorous:

-----

I don't deserve you and I never will.

Thoughts keep tumbling over one another. I oscillate (a word I rather like) between loving you and hating you for being so captivating and hating certain obvious weaknesses in myself which allow me to find you so captivating when, at more sober times, it is nearly objectively clear to me that you are not all that exceptional.

I want to possess you, but possessing you would mean the end of the desire to possess you and I don't want the desire to go away. In the end, it is the desire to love and not love that we desire... or something like that I don't remember exactly I haven't read that book for a long time. Amherst was a long time ago. I wasn't impotent at Amherst.

I am Swann. I am inoperable.

Bombardini strives to be of infinite size: to overwhelm the other via the infinite increase of the self - even Descartes would blush at this.

A new take on Lewis Carroll's riddle: How is a maligned, immature raven like the writing desk of Rick Vigorous?

Frequent only runs this operation for tax benefits. That I publish a quarterly at all is part of the sham, but I love the quarterly...

Last night, I dreamt that, in mid-conversation, you began to chew on the carpet in my living room - really chewing on it. You ate right through it and continued until you reached the core of the earth, chomping your way through tectonic plates, magma (which is just indoor lava, right?), and nickel. I looked over the hole and accidentally slipped inside. I feared I'd be incinerated but I went into low orbit instead (that's what would theoretically happen, barring incineration, anyway) and just went back and forth between the hole in Cleveland and the hole in what was probably Mongolia or something... waiting for someone to pull me out on the other side, but no one did. Where did you go? Who pulled you out? Was it Rex Young?

I don't want to wake up with this pain in my stomach any more... microscopic you-shaped pins sticking in every pore as I, poor Rick, pour sweat and clutch at my abdomen as if clutching at pain ever did anything except magnify the pain.

I hate wordplay like that too. We have that in common. I really like that about you.

Ask yourself when we (everyone) became so afraid of change that we'd stick to certain modes of behavior no matter how self-destructive they might repeatedly prove to be.

Habit: that slow moving arranger of things without which no room would be habitable... at least I think that's how he wrote it.

If we end up handcuffed to each other in a massive dessert, I'm sorry in advance.

----------------

Transcript from a Session between Dr. Jay and Lenore Beadsman

-------------------

JAY: And these feelings from Rick... you don't welcome them?

LENORE: That's exactly what I just said.

JAY: So then you -

LENORE: Verbatim -

JAY: So you'd like for Rick to stop feeling.

LENORE: Entirely?

JAY: You'd like Rick to be some kind of vegetable, yes. You may even wish him to be dead.

LENORE: Back up a second -

JAY: There's no stopping now. I can taste the breakthrough in the air.

LENORE: But -

JAY: The thought of being intimate with Rick elicits a murderous reaction from you, because you realize that this intimacy would mean -

LENORE: I am paying you too much money -

JAY: You realize that this intimacy would be mean the unthinkable!

LENORE: ...

JAY: What do you fear most of all, Lenore?

LENORE: That I mean nothing more than what's said about me -

JAY: Yes, quite profound, but what's your next greatest fear?!

LENORE: That I might never be completely -

JAY: Shoed!

LENORE: Shoed?

JAY: You can't be shoeless with Rick, Lenore! You loathe bare feet! You'll never be shoed enough to feel comfortable!!

LENORE: Wait, no -

JAY: Even now you're wearing three pairs of socks, am I correct?

LENORE: Yes, but -

JAY: Breakthrough, Lenore! Breakthrough!

LENORE: Can't someone fear intimacy and commitment without fearing unhygienic feet?

JAY: Certainly not!

-----

Wanted: Literary Agent

From the desk of Rick Vigorous:

Frequent and Vigorous Publications seeks a literary agent who meets the following criteria:

-Must make Rick uneasy about his chance of ever possessing Lenore, despite Lenore's clear -perhaps even inexplicable - affection for Rick.

-Must never have experienced impotence.

-Must possess an unhealthy fixation on the "Back to the Future" movie series.

-Must be unhappily married to a woman of incomparable beauty and depth.

Please direct all flirtatious inquiries to switchboard operator and blogger Lenore Beadsman.

Manuscript Query #3

----------

To: F + V Publications
From: Rex Young
Subject: An excerpt from my “Beached Whale” manuscript. The genius of this particular scene lies in the uncomfortable tension created by the juxtaposition of a children’s game and sex. There is also some very clever oedipal symbolism.


INTERIOR - BEDROOM

SCENE: MAN and WOMAN have just had sex in bed. MAN is smoking a pipe. WOMAN is coughing intermittently. WOMAN’s eyes are closed. A worn poster of Back to the Future II is hanging crookedly over the left bedpost.

MAN
I had a strange dream.

WOMAN
While we were making love?

MAN
Making love?... No. Last night.

WOMAN
Was I in it?

MAN
No. I was on a beach [WOMAN smiles] and there was a giant sand castle. I wanted to stomp on it but it was too big to stomp on. And then ...

WOMAN
And then what?

MAN
... and then Biff Tannen from Back to the Future stepped out of the sand castle.

WOMAN
Biff Tannen?

MAN
Yeah. Biff Tannen. He was wearing a velvet smoking-jacket.

WOMAN
Strange.

MAN
And then Biff Tannen turned into a beautiful woman. We played beached-whale for a while in the surf and then started fucking.

WOMAN
Beached-whale?

MAN
Beached-whale. It’s where you lie where the waves crash and let them crash on you and try not to drown. You can’t use your hands or legs. You just lie there. I used to play it a lot when I was a kid. You never played beached-whale?

WOMAN
And then you made love to Biff Tannen?

MAN
Made love?... No, Biff Tannen had turned into a beautiful woman.

WOMAN
Before or after beached-whale?

MAN
Before.

WOMAN
Did you win?

MAN
Beached-whale? No. I don’t know. We just started fucking.

WOMAN
[Coughing violently] I never get to make love in my dreams...

MAN
And then the beautiful woman pulled out a permanent marker and wrote obscenities all over my body. But I didn’t mind because she had let me fuck her. And she was beautiful. And then I was back in the room I lived in as a little kid and my mom came in and got mad at me for having permanent marker all over my body. She said it was going to make me sick. I think I was naked.

WOMAN
Why do you always say ‘fucking’ instead of ‘making love’?

MAN
[Putting out his pipe] People in movies make love. Real people fuck.

WOMAN
I wish we could be in a movie sometimes...

MAN
So what does it mean that my mom got mad at me after I fucked a beautiful woman?

WOMAN
...our movie could be about a giant sand castle. I’m the queen of the castle and you’re the lowly serf that lives in a giant seashell down the beach. But I love you anyways. And everyday we play beached-whale for hours and then make love in the surf without using our hands or feet. And try not to drown...

MAN
A movie.... What if you turned into Biff Tannen?

WOMAN
I won’t.

MAN
You’d look sexy in a velvet smoking-jacket.


[WOMAN turns into Biff Tannen, naked]

WOMAN
I know.

[MOTHER OF MAN enters room, smoking a pipe]

MAN
Fuck.

END SCENE


Postscript: I will submit the rest of the manuscript once I have contractual assurance from your firm that, in the event that this manuscript is turned into a movie, F +V will make no such production deal unless I am cast as MAN. Maybe Lenore can play WOMAN.

----

Rick is absolutely ecstatic about this submission. He thinks it will almost certainly appear in the quarterly review. He even said something about wanting to hire anyone who was capable of combining "Pop culture references, deeply psychological and nearly universally held sexual impulses, and "fun for the whole family".

I'm beginning to think that I have no taste for good literature. I was deeply disturbed by this submission. I'm not even sure how this author, Rex Young, is aware of my existence. Does he read the blog? Does anyone read the blog? Maybe Grandma is right about the words thing...

Transcript from a Dinner between Rick Vigorous and Lenore Beadsman

FROM THE DESK OF RICK VIGOROUS:

---

LENORE: We could ask the waiter to the turn the air conditioner down...

RICK: Lenore, I'm a sweaty man regardless of external conditions. I could be frozen in ice for thousands of years and then unearthed perfectly preserved and perfectly perspiring.

LENORE: Maybe they have a bucket or a towel in the back.

RICK: Let's cease our discussion of my fluid production for a moment.

LENORE: Okay. So what do you recommend?

RICK: That you and I should date. Perhaps indefinitely.

LENORE: Huh? I was talking about the menu.

RICK: The squid is good.

LENORE:...

RICK: Can I tell you a story?

WAITER: Good evening. Do you know what you'd like?

RICK: To possess another human being... and the ribeye

WAITER: Very good sir. And for you, miss?

LENORE: The squid.

RICK: Okay so here's a story which I think is quite relevant to my recent suggestion.

LENORE: Is this from a manuscript?

RICK: Yes. Anyway, it's from another sad college student and of course you received my letter lamenting the number of college students writing long, sad, convoluted stories. This story, however, is particularly sad, but not for obvious reasons: there's no real tragedy, unfortunate circumstances, or pathetic characters to wring sympathy out of the reader.

LENORE: So what's so sad about it?

RICK: The absence of struggle is conspicuous. We're presented with an idyllic relationship between a man and a woman who completely understand and love each other. We watch as they do normal things: grocery shopping, driving in the car, having dinner, making love (and the man isn't impotent... not once), and discussing their plans for the future which include travel, children, perhaps another home. It's all perfect.

LENORE: I must be missing something...

RICK: In many manuscripts, everything I just described would serve as set up to some great fall or discovery. For example, after all this, we find out that the man's having an affair, or the woman, or both and then we watch as their idyllic life crumbles around them. Or maybe we'd go further into the future and discover that they're inexplicably unable to conceive, or there's a miscarriage, and the whole thing falls apart... some kind of conflict or struggle - something.

LENORE: But there's nothing?

RICK: Nothing. The manuscript ends with the couple going on a rural weekend retreat with some close friends.

LENORE: Perhaps the tragedy happens at the retreat? A bear attack? A hunting/boating accident? And we're just left to wonder when the hammer is going to fall...

RICK: Interestingly, your reaction is similar to mine and it also illustrates what's so sad about this story.

LENORE:...

RICK: That we're conditioned to expect, perhaps even - on some subconscious level - demand the worst. The sad part of the story is that the reader can't accept something flawless and is utterly dissatisfied by the end - thankless for the sublimity in which the reader was immersed for the duration of the story.

Lenore: Of course we can't accept that - it's preposterous. Life is full of struggle and if art imitates life -

RICK: You're taking the easy way out. Consider for a moment that life is full of struggle because we insist that it's full of struggle.

LENORE: That sounds like something Wittgenstein or my grandmother would say -

RICK: Nevertheless. Consider.

LENORE: Considering... and no: we could walk down the street and see struggle or just eavesdrop on a conversation in this restaurant and hear how unhappy two people are together.

RICK: I'm not suggesting that if we simply didn't have a word for struggle then we'd globally leap into some utopian existence, but why shouldn't it be possible for just two people to be together and not struggle. Why does that repulse us?

Lenore: Ask the author.

RICK: I'm not sure the author even knew what he was writing. If I had to guess, then I'd wager that we're presented such a catalogue of perfection as an escape from the author's angst-ridden life - which, I must say, is a refreshing departure from angst-ridden authors who write angst-ridden stories. At any rate, I sincerely doubt he meant to evoke this meta-reading experience. Again, why is this portrayal of domestic bliss worthy of scorn and derision, even as an exception?

LENORE: I don't know. How was this relevant to your sudden suggestion that we date?

RICK: I don't know.

LENORE: Did you reject the manuscript?

RICK: Absolutely. No one wants to read that sort of thing.

-----------

Manuscript Query #2

Rick just handed me a query to review. I'd like to share.

----

To: F + V Publications

From: HCO

Subject: A Sweeping Novel a la War and Peace, Swann's Way, Don Quixote, and the Adventures of Curious George.

For your consideration, I have included the following excerpt from my ironically titled novel "A Novel, A Novel By" which will intrigue potential readers when they read "A Novel, A Novel by" a Novel by HCO (note: when I go on press tours to promote the book I will try to lower my intellect to the level of the people).

*************

George adjusted his visor on his helmet which was in fact a barber's basin, though his loyal squire, Poncho Sanza, wasn't going to say so. Among the other things Poncho refused to reveal, were the following:

• George was in fact a chimpanzee - not the old delusional human knight he had deluded himself into thinking he was.
• Natasha, the lady whom he sometimes referred to as "Dulcinea", was hardly a lady (she wasn't transgendered or anything - this is more an indictment of her moral character) and was already making plans to elope with Anatole (note: Natasha and Anatole are both humans).
• George's childhood home in Combray had been burned to the ground as they set off on their journey when Poncho finally succeeded in igniting his own flatulence
• Poncho was not a chimpanzee as he had claimed, but a capuchin.

George turned to his companion.

- See you yon giants?

- Of course, master.

- Methinks they doth mean the fair village harm.

- Perhaps they harness the power of the wind to aid in agricultural practices?

- Poncho, thou art a fool - thou'st merely see'th the foul enchantment of an enchanter designed to make'st thou think the giants be windmills.

- Honestly, I'm at a loss: there's no real way to assail that kind of thinking.

- Charge!

*****

I eagerly await your response.

-HCO

--------------------------

I don't even know what to say. Maybe I'll come up with something while I'm at dinner with Rick tonight. He invited me out and I felt oddly compelled to go.

To All Ennui-Afflicted College Types:

From the desk of Rick Vigorous:

I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely…interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.

---

D.F.W. The Broom of the System

Transcript from a Session between Dr. Jay and Lenore Beadsman

I'm not sure why I'm sharing this with anyone. Then again, I'm almost positive that no one reads this thing (does F + V Publications even have any readers?), so it's more like a journal than a broadcast. I just want to give an example of the therapy I have trouble remembering why I pay for sometimes (to clarify: sometimes I forget why I pay; my pay is quite constant).

---

LENORE: Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?

JAY: What the hell does that mean?

...

LENORE: Well see, it seems like it’s not really a life that’s told, not lived; it’s just that the living is the telling, that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all?

JAY: I really don’t understand.

LENORE: Maybe it just makes no sense, Maybe it’s just completely irrational and dumb.

JAY: But obviously it bothers you.

LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.

JAY: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me.

LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?

JAY: “…she said, using words.”

---

From The Broom of the System.

He's basically useless.

Lenore (sr.)

Last night, I visited the nursing home where my grandmother receives care. I'm really the only person in my family who visits her and I'm not even sure if she appreciates that. She's 93 and some part of her internal thermometer is busted, so her room as kept at 98.6 degrees which makes any visit rather uncomfortable.

Adding to the discomfort, Lenore (sr.) used to be a student of Wittgenstein and she frequently lectures me on everything from semantics to ontology (those fields are not very distant for Wittgenstein). I'm fairly certain that she is attempting to make me believe that my existence is no different from a character's in a novel. Dr. Jay does not have much to say on this point, electing instead to interrogate me about my sexual inclinations (an awfully boring subject I can assure you).

What if all we are consists in the words spoken and written by/about us?

She makes my head hurt, but the thought of her lying there in her sweltering jungle of a room without any visitors is too depressing - I have to visit.

Manuscript Query # 1

I'm sure that this posting violates a number of confidentiality agreements, but if Rick really can't read this blog then I don't really have anything to worry about.

The following is the submission from the author who called and berated me earlier this morning:

----

To: F + V Publications

From: JKG

Subject: A College Coming of Age Manuscript... a la The Graduate, Catcher in the Rye, and Gulliver's Travels.

Please consider the following excerpt from my novel "Unversed in University" (notice the exceptional word play):

Ben Holden paused in the empty quad to tie his left shoe - profoundly, his right shoe has never come untied in his entire life. He lit his zippo three times, allowing the previously agreed interval of three seconds to pass between each flame. A woman emerged from the shadowy umbrage.

-Lookin' for a good time?

-That depends...

-Depends on what?

-Whether you're the prostitute I arranged to meet earlier during one of my existential crises in which I realized that I was deeply undersexed and perhaps in need of human intimacy despite its status as commodity once I pay you for it.

-Huh?

-....

-Are you some kind of freak? Cuz I don't...

-What? No. Tell me something, how much would I have to pay you to love me?

-I'm leaving now.

-Immediately or metaphorically?

The woman left immediately and metaphorically.

****

Look forward to hearing from you.

-JKG

------------

I think Rick was right in rejecting that sample. I told him so and he seemed to convulse with pleasure or maybe he has a nervous tic or something. Anyway, he promised that I'd get to review more manuscripts. I look forward to it.

-L

Your New Switchboard Operator/Digital Publicist

I'm not a fatalist exactly, but the classified section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer really leapt out at me this morning. I immediately applied and within seconds I received digital confirmation informing me that I was now the Switchboard Operator at Frequent and Vigorous Publications.

Dr. Jay assures me that it's the right environment, since it will allow me to evade the ever increasing scrutiny of my father, Stonecipher, whose company, Stonecipher Baby Foods Inc., has recently begun to aggressively pursue a new, secret formula that I'm afraid he has been testing on my poor bird. Also, everyone here wears shoes at all times.

Rick is... interesting. He has given me the task of maintaining the Publication's blog (obviously), because "everyone is blogging these days" and "we don't want to be left behind". He assures me that he doesn't even know how to "work the confounded internet", but then I wonder who has made the previous posts here (particularly the first one which appears to be Rick writing in first person), including the job listing. From what I can tell, Rick is the only person who works here. Who is Frequent? Mysteries abound.

Today, I've already answered several phone calls for "The Christopher Lloyd Fan Club" and "Giant Fish Bowls Unlimited". The only person who was actually trying to call Frequent and Vigorous Publications screamed that his manuscript about "a college student who goes to college" was destined for greatness, despite Rick having rejected it.

When I get off work, I'm going to go visit my grandmother Lenore (sr.) at the nursing home. Hopefully, she'll have some new word games for me.

-L

NOW HIRING: Switchboard Operator

From the desk of Rick Vigorous:

Frequent and Vigorous Publications seeks a female candidate who matches the following criteria:

- Ultimately unattainable, though she may date Rick for years with the promise of fulfilling him.

- An irrational fear of bare feet.

- An intricately damaged family dynamic in which no member of the family trusts another.

- A patient of renowned psychiatrist Dr. Jay Kepler.

- Owner of an unusually garrulous parrot whose chattiness may be owed to the genetic operations of a certain baby food.

-Phone skills.

On account of the malfunctioning switchboard, a phone call to F + V will not suffice. Please direct all serious inquiries to RVigorous@gmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you, Lenore.

The Switchboard is Malfunctioning

From the desk of Rick Vigorous:

As if my malfunctioning penis weren't the source of enough frustration and despair (see: the bodies of work by John Updike and Philip Roth, respectively), the switchboard, too, has been reduced to an impotent husk of its once gallant self. On account of its defectiveness, I've received dozens of messages from callers intending to find everything from information on Podophobia to requests for Wittgenstein's lectures (neither of which we at F+V have certainly ever published).

I don't have time to deal with this problem, since I have been struggling to find appropriate material for the next "Frequent and Vigorous Publications Quarterly", so, hopefully, all the switchboard needs (and my penis for that matter - though if Dr. Jay is right this is not the solution at all) is a woman's touch.