Short Story / TED and Thanksgiving

TED and Thanksgiving

Ted and I took an undergraduate creative writing class together. I considered him talented but had problems with his choice of subject matter. He wanted to write horror/fantasy novels, and read a lot of Stephen King. Ted had many of the tools a writer needed, an ear for dialogue, a since of pacing, and most importantly, Ted could make the characters come alive. I often felt personally involved in the lives of his protagonists. The problem was that Ted wasted his talent on fairytales. He had been working on a book for sometime about an artist who could look into the future and past. The artist would go into a trance and paint what he saw. It was a good racket, his paintings were a great success due to the haunting immediacy of his dark visions. The drawback however was that as a result of his “gift” the painter developed a brain tumor.

Often we would get coffee after class and read each others work. One afternoon I said to him “Ted, you write well. I wish I had half your talent. But why do you waist your time on this fantasy bullshit? Why don’t you write about the real world“?. After saying this I immediately felt I had been too blunt, he was very sensitive. “I mean, wouldn’t it be more fitting for your talent to be devoted to real life?”

After a brief silence Ted said “Firstly, I don’t think you understand my work. I do raise serious issues, as does most fantasy. You just have to be a bit more subtle concerning the way you read these works. Stephen King, for instance addresses any number of questions concerning the nature of evil, the creative process, identity etc.., You need to stop taking my work so literal. A writer lives in his imagination. Why be fettered by the mundane when you can create worlds in your head. This is an act of sheer creativity. What a gift it is to be able to create any world you want.”

“Yea, I said “maybe so, but it seems to me that grown-ups should think about the hard realities, not dream up fairies to play with when their life is not entertaining enough. I think it’s ridiculous to write about vampires from the ninth dimension when the real horror story is across town. Demons don’t scare me, but ending up homeless sure as hell does. We got people dying in the streets in this country. Fuck vampires. If you want to see evil, we can ride down to the south end. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to write like Boukowski to be real, but if you want to shake people up, or scare them, take a look at the world. It’s scary and mysterious enough without vampires”.

Ted considered quietly, staring into the cream swirls in his coffee, “What do I know about the south end, I’m from Plano. Do you know what my dad does? He’s a copy editor for the Plano Townsman My mom teaches Music Appreciation at UD. What do I know about poverty or whatever. Bukowski wrote about what he saw, what he knew. It would be bullshit for me to write about what you seem to term “real” themes when I went to a Catholic School growing up. That’s phony.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying write about the actual social conditions which exist. Anything else is not only false, it’s politically contemptible”

“OH GOD” he rolled his eyes “spare me your Marxist ascetics, I’ve taken Dr. Coons too, please spare me anymore lectures”.

I felt a little hot at that comment but let it go at that.

Ted was a class act. He wore slacks and button up shirts, but was not at all “snobbish”. What made this all the more interesting was that he was surrounded by “freethinkers”, “hippies” and guys that wanted to be Andy Worhol or Tom York. Ted stuck out like a sore thumb in his cardigans. But he was never condescending or snobbish. People with REAL class never are. He was on academic scholarship and could have went to just about any school he’d have preferred, but wanted to stay close to his parents. REAL Class. I meet him at a time I was going through what was (for me) a hard break up, and he would often let me stay the night at his place. I hated being cooped up in my little efficiency. He didn’t allow drinking so he also helped me put together a little sobriety by . He never asked for anything in return. REAL class. He read fiction voraciously. All the high modernists, but also as I said, a lot of what I considered shit. But, I loved him just the same.

Ted had a beautiful girlfriend, whom lived with him. I called it Ted’s place because she didn’t pay rent. She was nice enough, and seemed to love him. When he wasn’t talking about Stephen King or Pound he was talking about her. He was madly in love with her. Who wouldn’t be? She had bright red hair and a sweet smile. In fact, she was sweet all around. Her little breasts rode high and so did her behind. And she new how to carry them. They started dating sophomore year in high-school, and attended the same college to stay together. He swore she was a virgin before she met him, and that nether one of them wanted anyone else, ever. This turned out to be as fantastic a story as those he wrote.

As an aside, I used to tell him to use his experience with her as inspiration for a story. He thought that it would be a breach of confidence to do so. Walking to calss on day I complained “I’m not saying write about ya’lls sex, I’m saying use your experience to make some universal statements about relationships, that’s all. Even if you did write about the sex, you could change things up enough to spare any intimate or overly personal details.” He didn’t like the idea.

He had planed to go home for Thanksgiving. The last day of class before the Holladay he packed his stuff and started the drive home. Mid-way he discovered that he forgot some medication and turned around to retrieve it. Upon his return he found his sweetie-pie in their apartment, naked, on all fours, sucking off some guy. To make matters worse, he told me it looked as if the guy had his fingers in a potentially painful spot.. Probably so. This threw Ted for a loop. He promptly moved out and was not the same afterwards. We remained friends through the whole ordeal, and I would say to him, “Ted, look I know how you feel. I’m coming out of a funk because of a breakup. I don’t know what to say, except that you should write about it. Get it out on paper. It’ll make you feel better, plus one day you might be able to capitalize on all this. Write about it. This is the real stuff, the cold reality of love. Everybody goes through it. This is the stuff folks can relate to, the stuff that hits people where they live.”

But Ted did the opposite. He threw himself into fantasy. He wrote all day every day after that, not about love and betrayal, but about UFO vampires from Zenon. Also, he took to drinking for the first time in his life after that. Sometimes he would cry, when we got to talking about his ex.

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