Help Edwin with a story!

[Guest Edwin MacPhisto]

Hey all. I've got to submit a short story to a professor by tomorrow if I plan on getting into an upper-level fiction writing class this semester. I only finished it this weekend, so it's still in rough form, with little time to edit. So I'm thinking to myself, where in the hell am I going to find a bunch of readers who're used to reading long pieces and providing feedback?

 

Duh.

 

If anyone could help me out here with a readthrough and some feedback, I'd be much obliged. It's not even the length of a Smarkdown main event, so it shouldn't take long. This is a rough draft, so I'm expecting a fair amount of criticism in addition to occasional flashes of "oo, I like that!" The departments I'm particularly interested in:

 

-Are the characters clearly defined? Does the protagonist show any progression throughout the story?

-Is it funny? Is it interesting? Were you compelled to finish?

-How's the writing? Is it varied enough to keep your interest?

-Too much dialogue? Too little? Does the story drag on, or does it need to be fleshed out more?

-Does the story show thematic unity?

-Is the climax sufficient, or is more action necessary to build to a satisfying conclusion?

 

Anyone who can help me out here will be rewarded with biased match marking and gratuitous Helen Keller jokes. Thanks a ton, everyone.

 

Oh, and it's somewhat about porn. That should sell it for Tom, if no one else. Without further adieu, I give you: "Dirty Mind."

 

 

 

“Dirty Mind”

 

As far as love goes, I’ve never been the most successful man. I’ve never been a starting quarterback, and I’ve never played the guitar. I can’t dance unless I’ve had at least half a dozen shots, and I have a way of ruining perfectly good conversations with some sort of awful stumbling prattle. My relatives tell me that I’m getting more handsome every year, but I think they’re just being nice.

 

I’d gone over a year without a girlfriend and I was beginning to get a little unstable. I depend on women. I made it through high school because I had a modestly attractive girl on my arm senior year. I stumbled through college with a few flashes of luck and a lot of digging around in the dregs. When Marcie left, I went through all the usual nonsense: moping, loathing, drinking, clubbing, despair, more moping six months after the fact, and so on, and eventually found myself taking freedom in stride and trying to get my life in order. I had one ally in this, and her name was, well, Ally.

 

Ally was both my ally and my older sister, and ever since I fell out of the womb she had acted the part of protector. She swatted away bees that she thought might have stinging me on their minds, and she taught me how to lie to Mom and Dad about where I was going at night—and about my career. She loved single life, but she knew that I didn’t, and she’d spent many of the last 365 days trying to set me up with people she met. I’d been on four, maybe five blind dates at Ally’s insistence, but for all her efforts I never let anyone in and never even bothered to get a phone number at the end of the evening. I’d resigned myself to isolation, but Ally hadn’t; this Saturday, I was scheduled to meet her friend Samantha. Ally was optimistic. I wasn’t.

 

“She’s great, Rick.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

It was almost midnight on Friday when the phone rang, and I was so shocked that I stepped on Jonesy the cat, knocked over a can of Dr. Pepper, and forgot entirely to pause my Aliens DVD. Sigourney Weaver yelled at a few things, and I scrambled for the phone. Bill Paxton shot an alien in the face, and I got the phone on the fourth ring.

 

“Gah…hello?”

 

“Ricky? Ricky, it’s Dave!”

 

Dave? Why’s my old roommate (who still owes me $85 for wrecking my shirts, by the way) calling me at midnight?

 

“Uh…hey, Dave. It’s been a while.”

 

“I know, right? How you been doing? How’s the new place working out? You still with Marcie?”

 

“Um…no, that didn’t work out.”

 

“Ah, man! That sucks. You know what I always said, though.

Bitches be trippin’, right?”

 

“Actually…”

 

The conversation went on for a tiresome length of time, as I sopped up the Dr. Pepper, explained the fights, tended to the cat, ran down my latest job (and Dave sure got a laugh out of that), described the break-up and why I really wasn’t mad at her for leaving though I had every right to be, and eventually I noticed that I’d left the DVD player running, and I made Dave cut to the chase.

 

“Dave, it’s almost midnight on a Friday. Why are you calling me now?”

 

He laughed.

 

“You’re never gonna believe this shit.”

 

“What?”

 

“I just proposed.”

 

“Proposed what?”

 

“Marriage! I’m getting married!”

 

The cat meowed. I almost did too.

 

“Well. That’s…surprising.”

 

“I met a chick, Ricky! Her names Glenda and she’s great and we’re getting married! Can you believe that? Me, Ravin’ Dave, settling down! I always thought you were gonna get yourself set up years before I ever did. Always thought you were a better guy when it came to stuff like that, you know?” He belched.

 

I blinked.

 

Somewhere in the living room, Sigourney Weaver was frowning and Bill Paxton was screaming “Game over, man! Game over!”

 

“But hey,” cackled Dave. “I guess I was wrong about that.”

 

 

Not even the rip-roaring finale of Aliens could pick me up after that. I was sitting in my apartment in the dark on a Friday night, scrubbing Dr. Pepper out of my rug, and the idiot roommate that I kicked out after he somehow left a beer bong in the washing machine was getting married. By comparison, I was alone with Sigourney Weaver and a cat and I hadn’t had a kiss or even a really good hug in over a year.

 

I hadn’t even tried to start anything consistent with any of Ally’s prospects. After the Marcie debacle I was sure I’d fail with every woman I met, after she found out about me. I told my parents that Marcie and I just stopped clicking; we were two people who clashed like broken guitar strings every time we tried to talk, rough noises and out of tune shouts coming out instead of words. We were no longer meant to be. My parents understood and pretended that they’d never liked Marcie in the first place, and we were okay.

 

But it wasn’t really my inability to hold a conversation anymore that drove Marcie away. It wasn’t my inability to sing or dance or throw footballs or even just to make her happy now and then. No, it wasn’t any of those things.

 

It was most definitely the hardcore pornography.

 

 

Let it be stated right now that I am not a pervert. I listen to a lot of Prince, but I maintain that I am not a pervert. I did not watch pornography throughout my adolescence because I thought it was disgusting and degrading, and when I started building the site I had a hard time sleeping because I kept having nightmares about floppy grey parts of the body that really should be neither grey nor quite so floppy under any circumstances. I did not want to read the e-mails from distributors because these people had a truly filthy way with words, and I didn’t enjoy setting up meetings with prospective models. I did what I did out of necessity. I did not choose BUTT-Vandals.com. It chose me.

 

What those internet job search sites don’t tell you is that they put your name in for everything. As a young man with a liberal arts degree and some computer science training, I thought I deserved more than the pithy salary I was making doing tech writing. I registered my name, resume, and relevant information at any sort of career counseling place I could find, and waited for a bite. And waited. And waited. My job wasn’t getting any more exciting, and I hadn’t found any alternatives outside of fry cook at Outback.

 

And finally, I got an offer.

 

It sat there, screaming obscenity out of my inbox, in large, lewd capital letters: “WEBSITE MAINTENANCE AND PRESS RELEASES – ADULT ENTERTAINMENT.”

 

I hesitated. It wasn’t exactly what I had been seeking. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the concept of “adult entertainment,” whatever that meant. Nonetheless, I scrolled down a little further to the projected salary, just to see how much this was worth.

As my eyes lit on the numbers, my scruples swiftly faded away.

 

Within two weeks I had a new job, and on the surface, it was a dream. I worked from home and set my own hours. I was making much more money than ever before. You’d think this would make Marcie happy, but then you’d be wrong.

 

At first she thought it was funny that I had to involve myself with so much porn, then even kind of sexy, and then weird, and then deplorable. The site was a fledgling operation based around (and I quote) “all sorts of amazing hardcore amateur action, from the front…to the BACK!!!” BUTT Vandals had a very specific focus as far as pornography goes. My job was to keep everything in order and write press releases and summaries for new features, videos, and models. A tasteful example:

 

Brittany has just arrived at State University on her eighteenth birthday, and she’s eager to make some new friends around the dorm. She’s full of existential yearning and, as a home economics major, a hunger for new things; for example, coed indoor sports, and foods she’s never, ever tried before—spicy Italian sausage, big black licorice, and hot French baguettes, to name a few. She’ll be doing a taste test in our Members Only section, on hi-res broadband feeds. Help her get over the humps of her freshman year…

 

My superior cut the “existential yearning” bit, but liked the rest. I made easy money doing simple, if vulgar tasks, and I thought I was quite lucky.

 

I wasn’t even working on anything major when Marcie dropped the bomb. She told me it was over a few minutes after I started taking screen captures from a movie called Bedtime Stories 9.

 

“Rick? It’s over.”

 

“Actually, I just got started…”

 

“No, Rick. Us. Over. I’m leaving you, Rick. Right now. I can’t deal with this anymore.” She motioned at Bedtime Stories 9, and that was that. She didn’t care that this particular tape was tame--that it was probably less explicit than something you’d find on Cinemax at 1 AM. I think she just wanted to make clear that her exit was defined and for one absolute defensible reason, no matter how harmless the trigger was. This was a lot bigger than Bedtime Stories 9.

 

I had known this was coming, but I had tried to pretend it wasn’t going to happen. It felt inevitable, no matter how I tried to make amends. Maybe our fallout was entirely porn-related, or maybe everything else was bad enough on its own and my job was just the porn that broke the camel’s back. As she walked out the door for the final time I knew there was something else on her mind, but I also knew that she was already gone.

 

“You write for a place called BUTT Vandals, Rick. I can’t take that home to my family.”

 

I tried all the usual routes of reconciliation, but they were wastes of my time. Marcie’s exit was the final word: demoralizing, destructive, and sad. This was why I hadn’t really dated in a year.

 

I sat in my apartment, slumped into the couch, noodling the phone about in my hand, thinking about Dave. He wasn’t as good a person as I was—in fact, he was outright bad in a lot of ways that I really didn’t want to get into. Yet he was getting married, and all I had were lonely nights and another stupid blind date on Saturday. I had a blind date with a girl who’d been deceived. “Samantha” would come into this thinking that she was just meeting Ally’s handsome brother. She would be clueless to the lingering presence of a pornography collection so massive that it could pass for a frat boy’s Ark of the Covenant.

 

Sitting there, miserable as I reviewed the last year, I decided that tomorrow’s blind date was going to be one of the most important nights of my life.

 

 

Before I left the apartment, I made a short list of topics not to discuss over dinner:

 

1. Porn.

2. Porn.

3. Porn.

 

As I sat on the bench outside Café Caldi, I wondered what Samantha would look like. Would she be more like Amber Valleys (feisty redhead) or Chesty LaRue (elegant blonde)? I knew she’d be wearing a red dress and be looking around conspicuously for a man in a purple tie. With my luck, I thought, wrapping the tie around my finger over and over again, the dress would be more like a moo-moo and Samantha would be one of the BBW’s from BUTT-Vandals.

 

(“BBW” stands for “big beautiful woman,” but let me just say that nothing about the frighteningly Orca-like ladies on that section of the site is beautiful except perhaps how much they can probably bench press. Some people buy very scary things, and I am really glad that I only sell this stuff.)

 

It had become this way gradually; at a rate of about forty hours a week, porn was slowly affecting my perceptions, especially after Marcie left. You couldn’t just be a cute girl, because I knew the sorts of things that cute girls could do if you paid them enough and put them in front of a camera. I knew how quickly they could leave you. It didn’t matter if a man was a rock star or a quarterback if he didn’t have the bedroom skills to back it up. I peeled back the surfaces of people now; I wondered about their secret lives as plumbers or pool boys or whatever strange characters they might play in one of the countless pornographic pictures constantly drilled into my head. Had our waitress tonight just turned 18? Was the dessert chef truly a master of his strudel?

 

The doorman at Café Caldi could be named Larry Long when he got off work. Some nights the hostess might call herself Patty Peaks. There were hundreds of ridiculous alliterative names always drifting in the atmosphere, unused and just waiting for someone to snatch them out of the sky.

 

“Rick Rollins?”

 

I looked up and was startled to see a Beautiful Woman who was not at all Big.

 

I nearly tore my tie off in the rush to stand up and shake her hand, and as I stood there with Samantha’s hand grasped in mine, I wondered why in the hell I was starting a date with a handshake. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Samantha” was all I could blurt out. She laughed, and I desperately wanted to ask her if that was a good laugh or a what-

have-I-gotten-myself-into laugh. I blame this on porn.

 

I loosened my grip on her hand, but she seemed comfortable on my arm. Hooked at the elbows, we strode into Café Caldi, all smiles and unsure glances.

 

“You’ve got a good grip,” she laughed. “Ally wasn’t kidding.”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“Mm, I don’t know.” Fancifully as she had arrived, Samantha tailed the hostess all the way to the table, taking charge as I shuffled along behind her in mild awe. My guesses had been wrong; she was neither an Amber nor a Chesty, but a brunette. Thinking back to my Highway 69 Revisited training (quite against my will, mind you), I recalled that brunettes were also always the most surprising women in town---or at an abandoned yet still elusively sexy truck stop, if that’s your thing.

 

Café Caldi was upscale and weakly lit in that expensive way, full of sharp corners, angular sculptures, and black and white décor. A grand piano twinkled somewhere in the distance, and between Samantha’s clingy red dress and my bright tie, our table became a splash of color in the otherwise sterile environment. “Ally says this place is wonderful,” said Samantha, looking around and askew at a bus boy in a black blazer, “but I’m beginning to wonder if she sent us to the right address.” A pointy-nosed butler-looking man came from behind and filled our water glasses, then disappeared back into the shadows of the pricey, dim lights. Samantha’s eyes shifted back my way, and she flashed a grin. “Kind of a scary setup, huh?”

 

“Terrifying,” I gulped.

 

As we settled down, I tried to stop imagining surprises and potential and pleasant goodnights. I could already tell that I was more interested in Samantha than any of the other women Ally had sent my way. That feeling was dangerous. If pornography has taught me anything, it’s to expect the expected. Every porn, regardless of being set in the future or at a truck stop or on a sinking ocean liner, adheres to a strict formula. There’s prompt disrobing, and then the man gets his. Then the woman gets hers. Then sex. Then other sorts of weird sex, usually with at least two but no more than three different positions per encounter. You already know exactly how everything is going to end—because after all, as far as porn goes, everyone has a specific outcome in mind from the outset—and getting there isn’t even an adventure anymore. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blind date or a threesome. You go through that formulaic build, hoping to god that something new and wonderful pops up along the way, but the grand finale always consists of Larry Long degrading Patty Peaks in maximum fashion and calling it a night. Everyone quickly goes home, silent and alone. This is a satisfying ending for about four seconds. Five, if you’re lucky.

 

Porn is very much like life. With money shots.

 

“Rick, did you hear me?” I looked up with a start and found Samantha looking my way with confusion. “Do you wanna split a bottle of wine?”

 

“Oh, sure. I like wine.”

 

“Something in common, already!” she said, flipping the wine list towards me. “Red or white?”

 

“White,” came my instinctive response. “It doesn’t stain the carpet as much if you--”

 

The process had been automatic, and I realized now that I’d gotten really bad. Choirgirls 5: Sister Mary Backdoor featured an awful little scene during a priest’s sermon, wherein some of the ceremonial red wine happened to get knocked off the pulpit after some misbehavior. It was not a topic befitting an evening out. “Well,” said Samantha, probably judging me silently, “I had planned on drinking most of it, but if that’s what you’re into…” She trailed off and bit her lower lip, and it became clear that this woman was absolutely running circles around me in the sublime charm department.

 

“Well,” I ventured, “sometimes I just like to spill it on the carpet, make little pictures and all. Kinda like those ink blot tests?”

 

“Ink blot tests?”

 

“Yeah, ink blot tests. Where you look at an ink blot and say the first thing that comes into your mind, whether it’s a…”

 

Do not say “Swedish cable repairman” or “big beautiful woman,” pleaded my brain.

 

“…a space shuttle, or maybe just a hefty cloud,” said my mouth, pulling off a victory in adequate fashion.

 

“I know what an ink blot test is,” she said. “It’s just…such a weird thing to say.”

 

I was weird. Great.

 

The subtle look of despair blanching my face was obviously not-so-subtle, because Samantha sat up with a start and immediately started waving her hands. “But I like weird. Weird is good!”

 

I needed to relax. The waiter stepped into the corona of light shining off our table, and I ordered a bottle of Chardonnay. I needed to stop thinking about every single sentence I said, because I was probably doing myself more harm than good with every over-analysis. Porn sells, I thought, because it’s simple.

 

My other blind dates hadn’t gotten past ten minutes before we broached the subject of careers. As a rule, these dates with strangers hadn’t gone off that well after I revealed that I was an assistant digital porn baron. I could usually tell that the woman wanted out by the time we were finished with the salad. As Samantha and I talked, I had the feeling that we were getting dangerously close to the find-out-about-each-other portion of the evening, and once the wine arrived my fears were confirmed.

 

“So what do you do, Rick? Ally told me you worked from home, but that was the most I’d gotten out of her.” I respected my sister in matters like these; she kept my dirty job a secret from my parents, and she’d kept it from every woman she’d set me up with as well. Of course, this meant that it was on my shoulders to reveal the horrible filthy truth.

 

“I’m a freelance writer.”

 

Or not to reveal anything at all. I had lied before I even thought not to, and it immediately felt like a step in the right direction. “A freelance writer?” said Samantha. “Have you ever been published? What do you write for? Have I ever read anything of yours?”

 

“I’ve been published…”

 

“Where?”

 

“…mostly in internet publications.”

 

“Like Salon?”

 

“Yeah. Like Salon. Magazines, journals.” It was a bit of a stretch, but one section of the site was called “Booty Weekly.” That was kind of like a journal.

 

“What do you write about?”

 

“Uh…stuff…and things.”

 

Samantha took a sip of wine. “What kinda stuff and things? Think I might have read any of it?”

 

“I sincerely hope not.”

 

“What?”

 

“I mean, I’m not a very good writer. I don’t write well. No, not well.”

 

“I’m sure you’re a great writer.” She reached out and touched my hand across the table, and my whole body rumbled.

 

“What do you do?” I stammered, quickly pulling my hand away.

“I,” she said, “have worked as a pastry chef, a stage manager, and a licensing editor for a small record label. Right now I’m…between jobs. I’m really just doing odd jobs here and there but…I’m jobless. Unemployed. There, I said it.” I thought about telling her that we had an opening at BUTT Vandals for a graphics editor, because we did, but then I realized that would probably be the stupidest thing I could possibly do short of kicking Samantha in the face and calling her a demon-whore. “It’s by choice, I guess,” she continued. “I got bored of organizing numbers and dollar signs all day, so I gave it up, and I haven’t really found that perfect calling yet. Is writing your calling?”

 

“No,” I said, flashing briefly on a bizarre and frightening scene in Playmate Of The Apes involving Misty Mondae and a man in a surprisingly skimpy gorilla suit. “I don’t think I’m entirely happy with what I do.”

 

“So why do you do it?”

 

“There’s money there. And right now, there’s nothing I really want to do—not to say I’m boring or anything. Just nothing specific. You

know?”

 

“I think so,” she said, “but I don’t think I could do that. I do a lot of things. I try to do a lot of things. I get bored if I’m anywhere for very long. It’s not a very stable life, but it’s fun, usually.” She shrugged. “Of course I have downtimes, but I get out of them quickly. Being a pastry chef, for example. I wanted a job where I could listen to a lot of music and learn to bake, so I brought a little CD player to work every morning and listened to the Velvet Underground until I got tired of making tarts and danishes.”

 

“You just left?”

 

“Well, I put in my two weeks. Piotr was nice, and I would never just leave him helpless like that. But I basically just left, yes.”

 

“Piotr?”

 

“Russian.”

 

“You worked at a Russian bakery?”

 

“I took Russian in high school, so I figured it might be fun. I learned how to make borscht.”

 

This was unreal. I leaned forward to interrogate. “Are you making this up?”

 

“Some of it.” Samantha, grinned, leaned back and stretched.

I was intrigued beyond all belief, but also intimidated. I opened my mouth to fire back, but nothing came out. I couldn’t top that. We had run into a bit of a dead end and suddenly I seemed to be grasping for thoughts, or even just words. The only things floating through my vacant mind were more weird thoughts about Playmate of the Apes, and those wouldn’t do.

 

“Your dress is really nice, you know.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Was I out of my league here? I lingered for thirty seconds, playing with the tablecloth and fumbling for another line, and then excused myself to the bathroom although I didn’t have to go. When I got back, the waiter had returned, and we ordered dinner: a Porterhouse steak for me, and a pasta dish involving portabella mushrooms for Samantha. “Are you a vegetarian?”

 

“No. I just like the word ‘portabella.’ Say it.”

 

“Uh…portabella.”

 

“Wasn’t that fun?”

 

And she said that I was weird.

 

The night rolled on in spurts like that, fluctuations of good and bad. We were holding a conversation that ebbed and flowed just like you’d hope, but it moved too crisply. I started to feel like we were just taking cues and responding accordingly. There were moments—reaching across the table to feed her a small piece of steak off my fork, or her tracing out some ink blot shapes when she spilled a bit of wine—that felt right, but the stiff, uncomfortable silences in between were still pushing their way into my mind. This didn’t feel like a first date—there were times that it felt like a last date, when at least one person knows that the jig is up and that the rest of the evening is just a waiting game. I imagined us as Ron Studd and Busty Sinclair, uncertain of what to do during the awkward bathtub scene in Tongue In Cheek. Unlike Ron Studd, I didn’t have any magical shampoo that could solve problems instantly. The dim lights of Café Caldi smoked over us and I wanted to go to sleep beneath them. I was focusing on the negative far too much, but it was routine. Sometime after the 4th glass of wine, I started falling into the same sad pattern that had crippled me on every date for a year.

 

“I hated going out to fancy restaurants when I was a kid,” Samantha said. “My parents always dragged me out to places like that for the holidays.”

 

“I hated them too.”

 

“And I hated having to get dressed up.”

 

“Hated that as well.”

 

“But I loved dessert.”

 

“I loved it too.”

 

“Did you really love it?” she said, sighing.

 

“Yeah, yeah. Dessert was very sweet. Like you.” I had just spat out the vocal manifestation of a sneer. Disinterest and futility swept in on their little magic carpet and whispered “give up” deep into my ear. For the first time in a long time I found myself wanting to go home to indulge in my trade. I wanted to take the rest of the Chardonnay with me. It would be a fine friend while I watched Dick Biggins take Candy Canes apart in all the worst ways. I hated this feeling.

 

“I’m in porn.”

 

“What?”

 

I didn’t know why I’d said it. The reveal had become an ingrained part of my dating routine; it came out when it felt a need.

 

“I’m in pornography. Well, not in pornography. I work on pornography. Sort of.”

 

“Oh.” Samantha put down her fork. “So you’re not a freelance writer?”

 

“Well, I am. Sort of.”

 

“You keep saying ‘sort of.’ What do you do?”

 

“I run a website—I don’t own it, but I help administrate it. And the biggest part of my job is writing. I advertise. I advertise porn. I write about porn.”

 

“Uh huh. Do you tell this to all the girls?”

 

“Yes, actually. They usually aren’t too happy about it.”

 

“I see.”

 

And we paused.

 

“I think I’m going to go to the ladies room for a moment.”

 

They all do that, I thought, and in a few seconds she was gone.

 

I had done it again. Samantha was cutting through the kitchen, looking for an emergency exit out of Café Caldi, just like Rebecca had. This would be even more embarrassing than getting caught watching Sonja the Ukranian plumber investigate Steven Rock’s pipes. I would tell Ally tomorrow that thank you, the effort was nice, but that I was done with her blind dates. I was resigning myself to priesthood in the church of BUTT Vandals.

 

Samantha ambled back to the table and sat down.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said. Hello, monastery of porn.

 

“Don’t be.”

 

I stumbled for anything to say, and the best I could scavenge was, “I guess we’re even now.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, when I went to the bathroom before, I didn’t really have to go either.”

 

“I did.”

 

I blinked. She was smiling. Usually they’d thrown twenty dollars on the table and left by now. This was unprecedented. This was bizarre. “So you don’t care?”

 

“About what?”

 

“About my…job.”

 

“Well, it’s weird. I’ve never really known anyone in…that business. But I said you were a bit weird from the outset, didn’t I?”

 

I had made all the usual mistakes. I had gotten dull and snippy. I had revealed my job. But I had underestimated Samantha, and I had done something else, too.

 

“Samantha, I think I’m very much liking this date.”

 

“Me too. Me too. Do you think we should get dessert?” She pored over the menu, but I pushed it lightly out of her face.

 

“Do you mean that?”

 

“Dessert? I’m still a bit hungry. I like chocolate. I bet it’s no worse than 3 to 1 odds you probably like chocolate. The Chocolate Dream looks like a winner, Rick.”

 

“No, I meant the date. Are you having a good time? Because I’m usually not the best at showing people a good time.” Samantha put down the menu.

 

“I mean it,” she said. “I mean, I’m not going to lie, and if I keep seeing you I should obviously know where I stand. It’s been a little plain at times. But it’s been good. You’re good, and Ally was right when she said you were…interesting.”

 

“Interesting?”

 

Samantha nodded. “Interesting.”

 

“Huh.”

 

“I’ve dated a lot of people,” continued Samantha. “It’s not like I expect to be absolutely swept off my feet the first night. It’d be nice, but it’s not required. You don’t expect that anymore, because that’s not how it works.”

 

“Did you say something about maybe seeing me again?”

 

“Is that all you got out of that?” She started giggling, which quickly turned into chuckling, and then full-on laughter. Shortly thereafter, I joined her. The waiter came by and we ordered the Chocolate Dream through grins, and by the time it arrived we’d pulled ourselves out of the giggle pit.

 

“I guess that kind of blows my cover about being macho, and tough, and playing hard to get, huh?”

 

Samantha nonchalantly took a bite of the massive chocolate cake. “You were playing hard to get?”

 

“Hey!”

 

“Just kidding.” Samantha reached across the table and took my hand, just as she had a few times earlier throughout the night. It was comforting. This was the kind of moment you never saw in a porn. Maybe there’s a little backstory—a preamble—but once that’s out of the way, no one even talks anymore. No one connects in any sense but the most graphic. You’d think that, when it’s all over, these people could look up from the bed, or the flatbed truck, or the Iroquois Indian dugout canoe, and spare a little bit of comfort. For all the groping and slurping and thrashing of bodies, no one ever bothers to just sit there, smile, and hold hands.

 

If I ever make a porn of my own, that’s absolutely how it’s going to end.

 

~FIN

[Guest Ace309]

Well, I hate to be wholly critical here, so I'll start off saying that I loved this story. I enjoyed it a whole hell of a lot.

 

- Remember Tom Swifty? "I can't believe the plumber's not here yet," Tom said with a flush. You only used non-'said' attributive verbs a few times, but they seemed a bit out of place and broke my concentration. Dave 'cackling,' for example.

 

- Here.

“Yeah, yeah. Dessert was very sweet. Like you.” I had just spat out the vocal manifestation of a sneer. Disinterest and futility swept in on their little magic carpet and whispered “give up” deep into my ear. For the first time in a long time I found myself wanting to go home to indulge in my trade. I wanted to take the rest of the Chardonnay with me. It would be a fine friend while I watched Dick Biggins take Candy Canes apart in all the worst ways. I hated this feeling.

 

“I’m in porn.”

 

“What?”

 

That could really use some sort of pause or spacing before he says "I'm in porn." Reading it through, the cadence is just very..... blargledyargle, to coin a phrase.

 

- Finally, a minor plot point. Maybe it's just my inability to read properly, but it seemed to me that the ending (the smiling and holding hands) doesn't quite fit in with the sort of incompetence he's feeling. Like, if I read the ending and started backwards, I'd have him feeling a bit less dating-incompetent and a bit more jaded about relationships. As it is, he thinks about porn a lot, but I wouldn't say it's truly affecting his worldview, and that leaves the body and the ending slightly disjointed.

 

I DID like it. I swear. It'd be great as is in GQ or Esq, but I really think it could clean up a bit.

[Guest Powerplay]

I loved it. Personally, I thought it everything you had was really clever for the theme you used, and I laughed my ass off at most of it. I'm not really good at picking apart pieces of literature, but I do know what is good and bad, and I thought this was really good.

[Guest Edwin MacPhisto]

- Remember Tom Swifty? "I can't believe the plumber's not here yet," Tom said with a flush. You only used non-'said' attributive verbs a few times, but they seemed a bit out of place and broke my concentration. Dave 'cackling,' for example.

And that's exactly why I love beta readers. I HATE using non-saiders, and usually cut them all out once I go back through. Thank you, wise-eyed one.

 

Two comments in an hour! Lord, you guys kick ass.

[Guest kelloggs]

The humor was well done and had me laughing numerous times. One missing joke to add, just becuase it reeks of Franchisablity is Rick saying something about his computer crashing from the massive amounts of porn he has to look at for captioning. And I think you did a great job with Rick's loosening up after the turning point. Personally, I thought it was a great read, but I'm an engineer so that should tell you what my opinion on writing actually means...

 

As I understand it, you were going for Rick suddenly breaking the news about his job, which had been built up as the defining moment in the date. If the admission is the stories turning point, there probably should be a great deal more emphasis on that. Maybe having Rick try to change the subject after the admission would help get that across? I felt he was worried but not as dismayed as he could have been afterwords. Since he clicked with this chick more than the others shouldn't he have been more upset... actually scratch that devastated? I said some dumb shit to females on dates but I've never admitted to writing for a porn site... was his initial attitute attributed to the fact that this same thing has happened so many times before this? I think that's what it was but am I even understanding that correctly?

 

Those were pretty much the questions I asked after reading this. For a reader like myself the story was well executed and I believe you answered those. The question is do you think you answered them cause these are the questions the other half of the writing ability pool might ask.

 

I enjoyed all the characters and if you ever continue this I'd like to read the follow-ups. I suddenly feel the urge to mark out but thats not really appropiate...

[Guest 5_moves_of_doom]

I didn't read it... but it says "Edwin MacPhisto" as the author, so... GREAT STORY, EDWIN!!!

[Guest Grand Slam]

-Are the characters clearly defined? Does the protagonist show any progression throughout the story?

The characters are defined enough for the size story it is. Being told in the first person aids that a bit because we can get everything in a filtered, internal monologue form. The main character changes just enough toward the end of the sotry that you can see the progression. At the beginning of the story he is sure that nothing will work out with women, and that seems to be undermining his ability to do anythig about it. Almost as if the porn were a crutch and an excuse he uses to keep women he's not interested in away. I thought the line

Disinterest and futility swept in on their little magic carpet and whispered ?give up? deep into my ear.

to be very telling. As soon as he feels that the date might go badly, he bails by dropping the porn bomb. By the end of the story, Samantha has taken all his crutches from him and he has to change his way of thinking.

 

-Is it funny? Is it interesting? Were you compelled to finish?

It is funny. No moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, but very funny. I was interested from the start and remained interested throughout the story, wondering how this woman would be different.

 

-How's the writing? Is it varied enough to keep your interest?

As always, I love Edwin's writing style, just varied enough to keep from being repetitive while maintaining a very interesting flavor and style. There is something about the phrases Edwin comes up with that I really enjoy.

 

-Too much dialogue? Too little? Does the story drag on, or does it need to be fleshed out more?

I think that there might be a bit too little dialogue. it almost seems at times that the conversation, while it is supposed to seem a little force, doesn't flow naturally. However, I would be afraid that adding more dialogue would cause the narrative structure to drag a little, so were I you, I would have made the same call. As it stands, the structure is good, if a little slow at the beginning. It seems to be setting up for something long and drawn out, but what really happens is a flirty, well-written dinner scene.

 

-Does the story show thematic unity?

Yes. Absolutely. Yes. It never seems to stray from Rick's core issues. The character of Samantha is used well, as is the ex-roomate, to highlight those issues and bring them into dramatic focus. For example, his simple

?You just left??

shows his inability to break out of the place he is in, while she was able to move on at will.

 

-Is the climax sufficient, or is more action necessary to build to a satisfying conclusion?

it is sufficient, but I would like to see it drawn out a bit though. It felt a little rushed, almost as if you had said what you wanted to say and looked for a way to end the story as quickly as possible. Although, I love the last little bit.

No one connects in any sense but the most graphic. You?d think that, when it?s all over, these people could look up from the bed, or the flatbed truck, or the Iroquois Indian dugout canoe, and spare a little bit of comfort. For all the groping and slurping and thrashing of bodies, no one ever bothers to just sit there, smile, and hold hands.

 

If I ever make a porn of my own, that?s absolutely how it?s going to end

 

That was a great little bit of writing.

 

Overall a good story, something a little unexpected wrapped up in a standard boy-girl romance thing. Good Stuff.

 

Oh, and I apologize for taking forever with this, and getting you my critique long after the due date, but I wanted to give it the time it deserved and not dash off a "I liked it."

 

- Grand Slam

[Guest Edwin MacPhisto]

Heh heh...thanks, Mark.

 

And thanks to everybody, really. I made some revisions, am now *much* happier with the finished work, and have submitted it. Here's hoping.