Non-fiction

A Trip to the Dentist.

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Yesterday was a day to forget. I woke up early as usual, but I was thrilled that I didn’t have to work. Instead I wrote for four hours, went for a walk and went for a swim before my two o’clock dental appointment. It was my first visit to this dentist whose name I didn’t know. The office was a mile away from my apartment, so I walked there in the blazing heat, making sure I got there early because I had to fill out a ton of paperwork.

Well, they gave me the paperwork at about 1:45 p.m. I expected to see the dentist in fifteen minutes, so I went as fast as I could. Four other people waited in the waiting room.

2:00 p.m.

I finished the form and handed it off to the unhappy receptionist. The same people were sitting in the waiting room as before. It wasn’t like a fancy dentist’s office that I’d been to. It was rundown, felt more like an urgent care. It was a bad sign when more than two people were waiting before me. It was also a bad sign when there was a television mounted on the ceiling, showing daytime TV. General Hospital came on. I hadn’t watched that show in decades.

2:15 p.m.

I figured, what the hell. There’s nothing to do today. I have all the patience in the world. A patient came out of the actual dentist’s office and waited in the waiting room again. That was another bad sign. What else were they waiting for?

2:30 p.m.

More people showed up. An old couple. A middle-aged man who also had to fill out a form. The body count was then eight people and growing. A young woman was celebrating her birthday on General Hospital, and then it cut to a dramatic scene between a man and a woman. The man looked out of shape. He didn’t belong on a soap opera. The woman wasn’t that attractive either. More people came out of the back and waited in the waiting room. Body count: ten people. My patience was wearing thin.

2:45 p.m.

Body count: back down to eight. People who were there before me were called in to see whoever the dentist was in that old office. I had the feeling I would be waiting there all afternoon and was tempted to leave.

2:55 p.m.

The young woman on General Hospital finished her birthday celebration by blowing out the candles on the cake. And one of her guy friends announced he was running for mayor. He would restore justice back to the city. The dramatic scene between the man and the woman reached its dénouement when the woman left his apartment, and he stared into his glass of gin (or was it vodka?) some clear fluid. Ah. So he was an alcoholic. Fade out. Credits rolled. I was about to leave.

3:00 p.m.

The same amount of people were in the waiting room. The old couple lost their patience, so the old lady limped up to the receptionist desk to ask what was taking so long. I tried to listen in but couldn’t hear what the receptionist was saying.

3:15 p.m.

The Kelly Clarkson Show had already begun after General Hospital. Man, did she lose a lot of weight. I didn’t know. It went to show how much daytime TV I watched. She brought out a country singer, and they had a banal conversation. I texted my mother. Should I just get up and leave? I never heard back from her.

3:30 p.m.

I was shaking my knee, ready to lose my mind in there.

“Ben?”

It was a miracle. I grabbed my backpack and hurried towards the nurse before she would change her mind.

She took me through the back to an X-ray room where they did that annoying thing and placed that uncomfortable rubber piece in different angles in my mouth and took pictures.

3:45 p.m.

The back of the dentist’s office resembled the dungeon in the film Hostel. Except I didn’t hear a leaking pipe. It was a mistake choosing this dentist. We all make mistakes. The nurse led me to a dentist chair in a room where there were no barriers for other patients. I walked past a woman who looked as if she was suffering through a root canal: a lot of drilling with a pair of shades over her eyes. I sat in the dentist’s chair. The nurse asked me questions such as if I was feeling any discomfort.

“Just gum irritation but nothing to be alarmed about.”

The nurse typed into a computer.

“The dentist will be with you shortly,” she said before she walked away.

I knew what “shortly” meant in there.

4:00 p.m.

I remained lying in the chair, staring out a window where the blinds were crooked. Only a rundown dentist’s office would have something like that. I couldn’t see them but I listened to a nurse or someone shouting in a foreign language at one of the patients. Man, did I make a mistake coming there.

4:15 p.m.

The dentist stepped in. Finally, after my appointment was at 2:00 p.m., but I didn’t complain. She looked at my X-rays and checked my mouth. She never asked what I did for a living, which was a first. She wore glasses with a protective plastic shield and a surgical mask. Maybe that Hostel movie wasn’t too far off.

”Open wide, please, “ she said.

She started that game where the nurse came in and the dentist started spouting off numbers two, three, four… Four, two, two, two, three, three, four, four, three, three, two…

Anxiety mounted as I knew not what those numbers meant.

After the numbers game, she left me alone in there again.

4:30 p.m.

The dentist returned with her assistant. I could barely understand her because of her accent and the surgical mask, but it sounded to me as if she said filling replacement. Damn it.

”You have receding gums,” she said.

She made me hold a mirror while she opened my mouth and showed me a tooth where the gum receded so far back that I could see my root. It was hideous. I wished she wouldn’t have shown me. I had no choice in the matter but to accept the filling replacement. I never even got a cleaning after waiting in there for two and a half hours. Her assistant handed me a financial breakdown of what I would spend. Two hundred and fifteen dollars spent on the filling replacement after insurance. Could be much worse. But I would have to go back there, and I had to set a new appointment for three weeks later. At least I knew what to expect.

Non-fiction

Getting Old

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Yesterday, for Father’s Day, my parents took me to the 849 Restaurant & Lounge in Palm Springs. The decor was all white with old-fashioned wooden chairs and tables. They gave my mother a miniature coat rack for her to hang her purse and sweater on. I ate fried chicken with a biscuit and mashed potatoes. My father ate Chicken Milanese, while my mother ate Scottish Salmon with rice cakes. It was the best dinner I’d had in months.

We got to talking about old age. My father is seventy-eight. He doesn’t think he’ll live for another ten years. My mother didn’t say anything about that. She must agree.

They’re going to a funeral today. They have to drive three and a half hours out of town to attend it. The person who died was a family friend, and he was ninety-four years old. I saw him at the Greek church celebration a few weeks ago. He was in a wheelchair, missing teeth. He’d known me since I was a child, but when I asked if he remembered me, he said no. His daughter used to babysit me, so we were closer at one point in my life. A lot has happened since then. His wife had dementia, and she’s been dead for over ten years.

I’m turning forty-seven next week, and my mother will turn seventy-eight in August. Birthdays aren’t what they used to be. That’s for sure.

One of their friends baked me a raspberry cheesecake with a graham cracker crust. Last night, I helped myself to two and a half slices and couldn’t stop eating it. My parents and I sat on the couch in my apartment and didn’t have much to say.

“You need to make friends,” my father said to me. “That’ll get your mind off work.”

I couldn’t agree with him more.

“I’m seeing a neurologist this week because of this pain in my head,” he said.

“Your father bumped it twice on a golf cart,” Mom said.

He can’t remember people and places like he used to. He gets names wrong. It worries my mother, and it worries me, too. He used to be pretty sharp, but those times have passed. We have to remind him of things. Who knows where he’ll be in five years? The same for me. It’s difficult to think about, and I would rather not think about what will happen to me once they leave. Age catches up to us all. What else can we do but have friends to grow old with?

Non-fiction

My Time in Hollywood

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I spent almost seventeen years living beneath the palm trees and near the stars on the sidewalk. My slumlord was a witch. She didn’t cast spells or anything, or she did. I didn’t pay enough attention. But she would scold me every time I broke the garbage disposal. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to dump a pound of grease down there. Oh well. I lived and learned.

“You run the disposal every day for one minute,” she said. She grabbed my bottle of dish soap and poured it down there. “And you do this.” Her cigarette hung from her mouth as she told me. “Don’t be an idiot.”

I couldn’t make sense out of it. I couldn’t throw anything down there: no celery, no stringy meat, no grease. So I ended up not using it at all. I was in my twenties, and I drank beer every night alone in my little castle, a studio apartment near the Hollywood/Highland shopping mall. My parents were afraid to see me because the traffic was too hairy.

The witch kicked me out of the garage one day because I’d broken the garage door for the second time. The garage door, as it was designed, was a steel gate that slid across a track sideways with a piece sticking out at the end. My car clipped it twice.

“You idiot,” she said. “You park on the street.”

I had to pay for a parking permit every six months. It was about sixty dollars each time.

I could park on my street except for the mornings when the street sweeper came, which was Monday and Tuesday between nine and noon. I never knew when it would come between those hours, but it didn’t matter. If I parked there, the parking enforcer would write tickets as if he were writing holiday cards. In other words, it gave him something to do.

And those were lucky times when I could find a space on my street. When I came home from my delivery job late at night, around ten o’clock, usually every space was filled. I would have to park on someone else’s street on a steep hill. Sometimes I would have to park a mile away from my apartment building. Sometimes it would rain. Those were times when I thought about bad things happening to that witch. She had to go. She may have cast spells, but I cast fantasies. I hoped for the day when I would make it big in Hollywood and move out of there, where it was less than a thousand a month to rent. But that never happened.

Instead, I had to live in the same building as her, and she made sure my life was miserable. She had the ugliest dog. It was gray with bloodshot eyes, the size of a Doberman but uglier. Every time I saw that dog, it would chase after me as I checked the mail.

I would fantasize about moving to the Hollywood Hills. That would’ve been great. My studio apartment in Hollywood would become just a memory. It’s a memory now, but the Hollywood Hills never came to be.

I remember the day when I moved out of the slum. The movers showed up and packed all of my furniture into a moving truck. They would drive it down to Culver City. My slumlord and her husband, with his shirt off and his belly hanging out, watched me move out from where they stood on the lawn. There came the moment when I handed her the keys. I didn’t even say “thank you” or “have a nice life.” I just dropped the keys in her hands and walked away.

Non-fiction

My Old Neighbor

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I saw a cricket in my Palm Springs apartment the other day. At least I thought it was a cricket. It could’ve been something else like a cockroach. God, please don’t let it be a cockroach. Whatever it was, I smashed it with my fist and wrapped it in a napkin before I threw it away.

It reminded me of my apartment in Hollywood from four years ago. I moved out of there during COVID. It was a month after the George Floyd riots, and Hollywood was bleeding slowly. I had to get out of there.

I remember this one night, I had a neighbor who was an actor in Hollywood. Go figure. He used to stay up late at night and rehearse his lines all by himself. I could hear him through the wall.

But one night, he brought someone over, someone with a British accent, and they yelled at each other. My neighbor was yelling, not the British guy. The British guy was calm and collected. It was my neighbor who was panicking.

”You crazy f**k, how could you do this?”

”Oh, you’re being completely ridiculous.”

”You’re sick. She didn’t do anything to you.”

”Now calm down. You don’t want to cause a scene.”

”What do we do with her? We can’t just leave her like this.”

Now, I was lying in bed during the altercation. I thought about calling the police. But what would I say? I knew my neighbor. We would talk to each other when we met in the hallway. He was a nice guy, but not that night. He was screaming from the top of his lungs at this British character. Or maybe there was no British character. Maybe my neighbor was rehearsing a scene, and he was going back and forth between the British character and himself. I was hoping for that.

”We have to do something before the cops come. We can’t just leave here like this, you sick f**k.”

”I said quit being ridiculous. We have it well under control.”

It felt like the yelling went on all night. I let it pass and fell asleep at some point after drinking enough beer.

The next time I saw my neighbor, it was a few days later, and he was singing a different tune. He smiled at me in the hallway. Not only was he smiling, he was glowing in a manic sort of way.

”What’s up?” I said.

”Hello, Ben. Guess who I found the other night.”

Uh, I was thinking a woman’s body, but I played dumb.

”I don’t know. Who?”

”Jesus. I found Jesus.”

”Oh, okay.”

”And he told me to pass the message along to you.”

”What message?” I asked.

”The word of God. God loves you.”

In the few years that I’d known him, he’d never once brought up God or Jesus. He was a party animal actor, a womanizer. Now, he’d flipped into a born again Christian overnight it seemed, ever since that fight with the British guy.

He gave me a copy of the Old Testament. It was smaller than my passport. His smile never left his lips.

”I want you to read this and come to my church.”

He was starting to scare me, so I began to close the door on him.

”Thanks,” I said. “I’ll read this and tell you what I think.”

I kept the Old Testament in my bathroom where I kept a lot of books: on top of my toilet.

One morning, I read it, and I’d never read the material before. I was sitting on the toilet with it, and my mind began to drift. Needless to say, the Old Testament was boring me. There were too many names to follow, too much exposition. It wasn’t getting to the point, so I stopped reading it and left it on my toilet.

Another morning, the Testament slipped off my stack of books and fell into the water. I panicked because my neighbor might’ve wanted the book back after I’d read it—-which would never happen. I quickly fished it out and tried to dry it as best as I could, but the pages were already soggy. When they dried out, the pages were stiff, and they weren’t flat anymore.

My neighbor came knocking. I guessed he wanted the book back, but I wasn’t going to tell him what had happened. It might’ve devastated him, angered him, whatever…

”Did you read it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

”And what did you think?”

”A lot of names to follow. I really like the part about Noah.”

”I want to invite you to a reading.”

I really didn’t have time for a reading, but how could I disappoint him?

He never found out about the toilet incident, and I never went to one of his readings. But I respected his quest to find Jesus and tried to keep what happened between him and the British guy private.

Out of deep curiosity, though, I asked him about it.

”You got into a fight one night with what sounded like a British guy. Who was it?”

”Oh. It was nothing big.”

I guessed it was sort of none of my business.

I still have the Old Testament somewhere and tried reading it again, but again, my mind drifted, and I couldn’t concentrate.

My neighbor moved away soon after that to Glendale. He gave up his acting pursuit to go on a mission to talk others into finding Jesus, and I believed he said he was going into real estate, too. We hugged before he left.

”Keep Jesus in your heart,” he said.

Those were his last words.

We’re still on Facebook. Every month or so, he’ll post something about Jesus and the importance of Donald Trump. I always read those posts. They’re short and to the point, unlike the Old Testament.

Non-fiction

Dreams Are For Goats

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I’ve met people who remember their dreams, but I’m not one of them. I wake up early and think, “Wow, that was a wild dream,” but ten minutes later, I forget what the dream was about.

But last night was different. I dreamt that my father was being carted away on a stretcher to a Ralph’s grocery store. The medics were zombies. A zombie surgeon waited inside to perform open heart surgery. My father was unconscious with his shirt open, with those suction cups attached to his chest with the EKG monitor by his side.

I begged the medics not to take him in there, but zombies wouldn’t listen.

I’ll never know what happened to my father once he was inside the Ralph’s. Sometimes dreams have sequels. Maybe I’ll go to bed tonight and have the same dream. Only this time, it’ll continue where the first dream left off.

I don’t believe I have control over my dreams. I seem to be passive in them. Some people practice lucid dreaming. There are certain rituals before bedtime to activate lucidity. One of them is to keep a dream journal. That’s all fine and dandy if one can remember what the hell they’d dreamt about. I cannot. I’m better off not dreaming at all, which is fine by me. Far too many times have I awakened from a bad dream and thought, “Holy hell, that felt real.” I can’t afford bad dreams. Life is a bad dream already. Who needs a double dose?

The only difference is life isn’t bizarre enough to where surrealism plays a factor. Except Trump was president. That was surreal in its own fashion.

A friend of mine said he once had a dream where his keys were made out of salami.

Some people claim to be dream interpreters. My old psychiatrist said he could analyze them, any of them. I dreamt that I threw up in a car in front of an Auto Zone. I was in the passenger seat, and a jerk whom I used to work with was manning the steering wheel drunk.

My psychiatrist asked me what the color of the vomit was to make sense out of the dream.

I made up the color because I didn’t remember. ”It was yellow,” I said.

”It means you fear you’ll lose control.”

I thought I could’ve figured that out on my own. But I said, “Wonderful insight, doctor.”

Anyway, my dreams have never enhanced my life. They’re just disturbances in my sleep. I wouldn’t mind if I never dreamt again.

Non-fiction

Random Thoughts About Serial Killers.

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I sometimes wonder how a killer comes to be. Is it a person who was raised not so well? I guess there comes a time when people just go nuts and kill a bunch of other people at a park or a museum. People are fascinated by these killers. Television shows present them as nefariously godlike creatures who are somehow special over all of us.

There was a show in which a famous host devoted time to interview a man who was indicted for a bunch of murders. Apologetic was the killer and polite as well, and even more polite than you or me. It came as a surprise. I didn’t think he had it in him, but apologies aside, he still committed murder in the worst degree, in which he lured a bunch of women to his car. The seventies were when the murders took place. And now the killer sits in prison for the remainder of his life. What thoughts ran through his head before he chose to kill them? At least he showed his honesty, displaying no remorse. It made me angry. I don’t watch those shows too often.

Like I said, some people are obsessed. Perhaps they’re too concerned with how they feel. What if they worry that they might have intent to kill? And so they watch and watch the interviews to make quite sure that they’re not murderers.

I wonder if a killer sits at home and watches shows like these. Suppose Ted Bundy used to watch the interviews of incarcerated murderers out of interest, not idolatry. Or he idolized them after all. Who knows? It’s hard to think he would. I can’t imagine killers of his nature watching television anyway.

Non-fiction

Another One of Those Days

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Here I sit in the coffee shop, another feckless bore, typing on an iPad. That’s right. Ha ha. I’m typing with a keyboard for an iPad instead of touching the screen a bunch of times like most people with iPads do. That’s because I bought a keyboard from Best Buy. They makes those now. I find it easier to write with an iPad for some reason, similar to when I’m texting someone on an iPhone. The words come out more fluidly. I don’t feel the need to censor myself or get uptight about things. It’s just like I’m texting my neighbor. Meet me at the pond by eight. There, that’s it.

I dream big dreams as I’m typing, but I won’t tell anyone what those dreams are. It’s my dirty little secret, you see? If I tell everyone, the dream might not come true. And then what? More medication for me to take? 400 milligrams of Gabapentin, 300 milligrams of Trileptal, 1 milligram of Klonopin, 15 milligrams of Abilify, however many milligrams of Adderall. I may have forgotten some. In a perfect world, I’m taking none of that crap. But I need it to keep me going. I take amino acids to reduce the withdrawal symptoms because I’m getting off one of those drugs. My doctor says she’ll prescribe me something that will lift my interest in activities again. As of now, there aren’t many that bring me joy. I work my dead end job, take a walk, and go to sleep. Those are how my days transpire.

Now and then, I’ll have a day off. Like next week, I’ll see the dentist on Monday. Wednesday is Juneteenth, so my boss told me to go ahead and take Tuesday off as well. There’s no use in working on Tuesday and taking Wednesday off again. So I’ll work only two days—Thursday and Friday. And then I’ll take the whole week off after that.

It’s for my birthday when I’ll turn the ripe old age of forty-seven. I’ll drive to Goleta where my favorite coffee shop is and stay for the night, and then I’ll drive to see my parents in Avila Beach the day after. I’ve been to Avila only once or twice in my life. My parents swear by it because of how gorgeous the weather is. They just want to escape from the triple-digit heat here in the desert. I don’t blame them, but something tells me Avila Beach will be overrated. I’ll stay there for a few nights. The drive there is over four hours. That’s why I’ll stay in Goleta for two nights: on the way there and on the way back. That way, I can break the trip up into an hour-and-a-half drive and a three hour drive.

And then the Fourth of July is the week after. So you can say I have it pretty easy for the next few weeks. But it’s back to a full week on the week afterward. Oh, well. Nothing lasts forever. What else do I have to look forward to? Nothing, really.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop, and nothing interesting is happening. I see the same old men sitting at the long table in the middle: the guy who looks like an Italian hitman, the guy with the tattoos on his neck who rides a wheelchair. Who knows what they talk about? The nice old man in the corner who always smiles at his iPad as if he’s looking at some endearing pictures of his family. The same baristas I see almost every morning, hustling about behind the counter. And me, trying not to be nosy, but I can’t help myself.

Fiction

Lost Forever.

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As a writer, have you ever lost your work forever? I’ve lost many drafts because of faulty computers. At one point, I was a Windows guy, going through them, destroying them—not the works, the computers. They were pieces of trash. Nothing against Bill Gates, but there was a reason why they cost so little and why Macbooks cost so much. I could buy a Windows computer for under five hundred dollars, and I did many times.

One day, at a coffee shop on Wilshire, I left my laptop—I think it was a Dell—sitting on a magnetic table where people could charge their phones. I was talking to a friend there. He’s not a friend anymore, not after what he said to me. We stood outside, smoking cigarettes next to my car, and he said, “Ben, you should give up being a writer. Find something else to do.”

I said to myself, “You’re over, pal. I don’t need you and your negative vibe in my way.” But I never told him. I just kept the anger inside and never went to see him again.

When I went back to my computer, the screen wouldn’t turn on. I pressed keys and kept pressing keys. The panic button in my nervous system had already been depressed. I kept jabbing away, but the screen wouldn’t turn back on.

“What’s wrong?” my shitty friend said.

I thought, “Shut up and get out of my way.”

The laptop made no sound and was completely dead. It was like the magnets in the table had somehow overpowered it.

I took the computer to the mall, where there was a Windows store, but they couldn’t help me. The people were useless. They stood around in their collared shirts and told the customers to wait all day to be helped. That or they flat-out ignored them. I was flat-out ignored, and my computer was dead.

They finally brought it to the back, where I guessed a computer laboratory existed, and I waited around for an hour for them to come back out with it. The lady in the collared shirt who was helping me returned with my dead laptop. She didn’t even tell me what was wrong with it. Instead, she began trying to upsell me for a more expensive computer.

All the work I’d saved on it was lost forever. That was my last Windows computer. After that, it was all Mac computers.

This was before the real advent of cloud services when I drained laptops. Now, I need to worry about losing any work as long as the cloud is synced up. But anyway, I lost several things that day: a friend and the last draft of my screenplay and novel. No wonder I’m writing about it. My heart still aches.

Non-fiction

Dumb

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I always figured I was dumb, not the smartest boy in class. They gave me C grades out of pity. I didn’t understand what I read while other kids thrived at the same material. The faculty held me back in remedial classes.

I remember the basement in the hall back in high school. That was where those classes were. I didn’t belong there either. I didn’t belong anywhere. I was unique like that. There were no windows. The gum was on the walls. Graffiti stained them, too. Who the hell did I belong with then? Certainly not the gifted kids. They took the GATE classes. Gifted And Talented Education. I had friends who took those classes. It was hard to relate to them when their education was so much higher.

But my mother called the school and told the principal to pull me out of those remedial classes. It was for the better. The most humiliating class was the woodshop because we had to build little bookshelves for the teachers and give them to them. Or the other shop where we had to make coffee mugs. We didn’t learn anything except a trade. And I imagine a lot of those kids grew up to become students at trade schools. Good for them because they’d acquired a skill for a career while I went to a junior college and a state school for my higher learning.

It didn’t get me far. I did, however, take internships. But they didn’t pay me, and they never got me anywhere in the company. So I moved back home without luck finding a job. Maybe I was too dumb. I could never formulate a resume. I didn’t know what skills I had, if I had any. My self-esteem was too low.

My psychiatrist said I thought I was incompetent when I really wasn’t, but I didn’t trust him. I really did think I was incompetent, and I still do. I have a job, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I pretend to know. I’m pretty good at that.

But anyway, being dumb has its perks. I accept less responsibility because people pass me up when they need something, and I can just stand and watch other people work. And maybe I’ll leave early.

When I leave somewhere, like AA meetings, I don’t stick around to stack the chairs. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s that I don’t know how to do it. How do you stack a chair? I tried it once, and I couldn’t fit it onto the chair beneath it. It kept falling off, so I said forget it.

So here I am, dumb as can be. And I’m not alone. Dumb people surround the world. They’re all about. If you don’t believe me, visit any social media site and read the comments. People don’t know how to spell bike for Christ’s sake. At least I’m not that dumb, but I’m not too far off.

Non-fiction

My Reading List

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I read a book last year about how to read, and I didn’t get the message. But it contained a list of books to read before I die, and the list is vast. It has been well over half a year since I read it, and I’m only in the Fs.

The author had posted the list in alphabetical order. Most of the novels are tough to read, especially Jane Austen’s, Brontë’s, Gustave Flaubert’s, to name a few. Reading them was like reading the label on a bug spray can. Not to take away from their artistic achievements, but goddamn they were dense. The paragraphs continued for a page, or at times, a page and a half, and the sentences were full of semicolons.

British authors in the nineteenth century loved to use the word paroxysm for some reason or countenance instead of looks or facial expression—words I would never use in everyday speech. But again, I respect their achievements, even when I’m thinking about what I’m supposed to buy at the grocery store later while I’m reading them.

One author, however, stole my attention. Her name is Jane Bowles, and her novel is Two Serious Ladies. Her language was so direct, and it sounded as if she was telling me the story while I was going to bed. Now she was an effective writer. Nothing pretentious. No need to keep a dictionary nearby.

In Southern California, we have In-N-Out Burger. The menu is simple: hamburger, cheeseburger, double-double, fries, soda, milkshake. That’s it. (There’s a secret menu, too, but for the sake of this comparison, we won’t go there). Bowles’s prose is as direct as that menu. No crispy chicken sandwich, no onion rings, or bacon avocado burger, nothing like that. It’s needless to say, I recommend Two Serious Ladies to anyone who wants to read a novel that carries them along instead of stopping them and forcing them to look up the word countenance for the thirteenth time because they’ve forgotten the meaning seconds after looking it up.

Again, I respect Austen, Brontë, and Flaubert, not to mention Dickens—whom I tried to read for a chapter but just couldn’t stomach the language. Dostoevsky gets my respect, too. I read Crime and Punishment all the way through, but I won’t lie and say I knew exactly what was happening in the story because of my ADHD. I take Adderall, and even that won’t help with reading the goddamn book.

Raymond Carver was another author whom I could read effortlessly, although a lot of his stories bored me. He would write paragraphs about someone opening his refrigerator and drinking from a bottle of milk. It was plain and easy to understand, but what the hell?

Right now, I’m reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It’s easier to understand than the aforementioned classic British, French, and Russian authors, but it’s still a challenge because Franzen tried to fit as much description and exposition in each sentence as I got lost in translation. But it’s still an enjoyable novel. At least I think I know what’s going on.

My hope is that, in this vast list of books to read, I will find another writer like Jane Bowles. I got to. There’s no way I won’t.