SETH SCHINDLER - DRINKING PISCO SOURS WITH ANDREW - HOW I FINALLY FOUND MY TRUE VOICE

A former pretzel peddler and clam digger--as well as Research Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Weatherhead Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research--Seth Schindler lives in Tucson, Arizona where he writes both fiction and non-fiction. His short story, "The Pretzel King of Brooklyn," was recently published in Rosebud Magazine, and his book about the plight of the hungry in America, "Sowing the Seeds of Change," will be published later this year by the University of Arizona Press. 

Drinking Pisco Sours with Andrew
How I Finally Found My True Voice
​

​Monsoon rain pounded the pavement, the big drops ricocheting in my car’s headlights like dancing popcorn.  
     So begins the seventh draft of my latest story, the one I hoped would make Andrew happy and Sylvia finally proud.
     Yet I can’t believe I still use that simile, like dancing popcorn. Talk about corny! Even worse, unoriginal. You’d think I could do better. After all, I’ve written three novels, two novellas, one novelette, 17 short stores, 29 pieces of flash fiction and hundreds of poems, and nearly all my teachers have said I was born to write.
     I think they’ve been lying. I was born to suffer.
     But I won’t lie—I’m still unpublished. Perhaps, then, you won’t mind that I borrowed that simile. OK, I stole it. So shoot me! As if I could give a shit. As if you haven’t ever committed an act of literary larceny, copped a well-turned phrase every now and then. I bet you have, especially if you’re like me: not just an embittered writer in the classic mode, but a contented reader of the classics, as well as a meticulous note taker, who keeps a comprehensive file of the most memorable lines ever written. Though I realize you probably don’t draw yours, as I do, almost exclusively from literature’s greatest tragedies and tragicomedies, ranging from Oedipus Rex and Macbeth to Humboldt’s Gift and, my all-time favorite, Portnoy’s Complaint.
     It wouldn’t surprise me if some of today’s celebrity authors were equally larcenous; with teams of crack researchers, they’re just much better at it than we are. Of course they have to be. Millions read their blockbusters, so they have to be particularly selective as to what they pilfer, and use sources far more obscure than a Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bellow or Roth. And If they get caught and sued, they have what the rest of us poor writing slobs don’t: the best shysters money can buy to prove it wasn’t their fault and to blame their transgression on drugs--for instance, the well-established side effects of the opioids they’ve been abusing for their sciatica, the result of sitting day and night at their computers crafting their page-turning thrillers and enchanting cozy mysteries.
     When all else fails, they can always attribute such behavior to the still-unknown, but hotly debated, consequences of another addiction shared by creatives of all stripes--eating weed gummy bears like there’s no tomorrow.
     I abuse opioids, too, for my sciatica, as well as for numerous other maladies, mostly of the phantom sort. I’m also a proud, card-carrying medical marijuana user, though only of the real McCoy and only in an old-fashioned joint, not that sissy CBD in a god-awful gummy bear.
     Unlike those other thieves, I blame only myself for my sins, perhaps because at this stage of the game I’ve got nothing to lose by admitting I’m a loser. In other words, just your typical unknown writer still searching desperately for his elusive true voice--not to mention true love.
     I’d settle for just getting laid every once in a while, like once every decade or so, my current dry spell.
      If that’s not bad enough, even my old teddy bear rejected me. Maybe Freddy saw something in me he saw in himself and didn’t like. I know that, like Freddy, I’m probably not what you’d call lovable, and certainly not sexy--with a prominent tuchis that would be my best feature if it weren’t almost as hairy as his. Yet throughout my life, paradoxically, I’ve had no problem attracting women, if only the most discriminating kind: those willing to look past obvious physical flaws to appreciate the virtues of exceptional wit, intellect and modesty, and who, ideally, share a neurosis or two. Not that I’m Arthur Miller, nor that any of these women was Marilyn Monroe. 
     Take the brainy Laura Bates, gaunt and chalk pale. She was my last girlfriend, however briefly and asexually. Some might say she damaged my self-esteem and took my mojo away. A slight exaggeration; many before her, notably my mother and my three ex-wives, had already done a pretty good job of that.
     Laura did have more in common with me than any before her. If I were a mensch, I might’ve fallen madly in love with her. She was that special, the smartest person I’ve ever known. I’d get a hard-on just listening to her talk passionately about her academic specialty: non-binary sexual metaphors in 19th century symbolist poetry.
     To top it off, and why I remember her so fondly, she never even once mentioned any of my glaring physical shortcomings including, remarkably, that feature most obvious by its absence.
     A fellow writer, Laura was my soul mate in rejection. Unlike me, she didn’t talk about it constantly. In fact, the only time I recall her ever alluding to her lack of literary success was on our first encounter at a summer poetry workshop at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a support group of sorts for frustrated writers.
     When we introduced ourselves, she announced, “I’m Laura, the holder of the Guinness World Record for the most rejection letters ever received in a single year from lit mags—11, 709.”
     Everyone responded enthusiastically, “Hello Laura!”
     Then a smartass—there’s always one in every writers group-- said, “That’s bad, Laura, and I do empathize, but I got you beat . . . if you count rejections from the new online lit mags that’ll publish anything, in any kind of voice, even a hamster’s, then give you a prize, as long as you cough up 20 bucks.”
     I swear that wasn’t me. I’m not that desperate, would never stoop so low to submit my work to those bottom feeders of the literary world. They shamelessly exploit the weaknesses of my fellow losers, as if we’re unaware that we don’t deserve to be published in a legitimate literary journal!
     When it was my turn, I said, “I’m Ben, a miserable failure too, but don’t like to talk about myself to complete strangers. So let’s talk instead about Infinite Jest, an Emperor’s New Clothes joke if there ever was one! Every time I tried to read it I wished I’d first taken a couple of Percocets. Are you sure this isn’t an NA meeting?”
     “Hello Ben,” the others replied--if less enthusiastically. And I’m pretty sure I also heard someone whisper, “Get lost, Ben”--no doubt that wisenheimer who wanted to dispute Laura’s record of rejection.
     Like me, Laura was struggling mightily to find her true voice. Unlike me, Laura was, as well, struggling to find her true sexual identity, something I never had to question. Based on my track record with women, maybe I should have.    
    I guess I was blinded by her erudition, particularly the elegant way she’d sprinkle into conversations literary references far more obscure than the ones I use routinely. Laura’s, too, were invariably classy, unlike the decidedly lowbrow ones of my last wife who, when she dumped me, said: “You’ve always reminded me of Holden in Catcher in the Rye . . . an obnoxious self-absorbed teenager.”    
     One afternoon at the workshop, we decided to skip what promised to be a totally absurd lecture—"Making a Living as a Poet.”
     “Let’s rent a movie,” I suggested. “How about Life is Beautiful? My favorite cinematic tragicomedy—well, next to The Sorrow and the Pity, of course. I almost cried the last time I saw it. You’re obviously a Europhile and now, after watching it six times, I’m quite certain I’m finally symptom free of second-generation concentration camp survivor syndrome.”
     “Somehow I doubt that,” Laura said. “Maybe what you need instead is a heavy dose of Mother Nature. I know I could use a change of scenery and some fresh air to clear my head. There’s only so much purple prose I can listen to in a given day. We could take a walk through the woods to this lovely pond I’ve heard is fed by a virgin spring!”
     “And swim in it?”
     Laura nodded, smiling. “And get to know each other better in it. What could be finer? To quote Horace, Ode 26: ‘Sweet muse, who lov’st the Virgin Spring.’”
     Anxious to finally spend some private time with her, and impressed by that recherché literary allusion, I agreed, despite my aversion to walking, fresh air, the woods and any natural body of water—virgin or not. Swimming is not my thing, either. I’m more of a bathtub floater, my specialty the classic dead man’s float.  
     Surprisingly, Laura took off all her clothes before getting into the water; unsurprisingly, I didn’t, being self-conscious about my hairy tuchis, which I suspected even the ever-discreet Laura couldn’t help but comment on.
     “Stop staring at me!” Laura said, when she’d disrobed. “Yes, I’m skinny . . . but so what? I’ve got good bones. That’s what matters the most, as you’d know if you read my favorite poem by one of the followers of the Minoan Snake Goddess cult in ancient Crete. It begins, ‘Oh, wise and strong Snake Goddess, protect our house, our soul, and give us the strength to survive the ravages of men.’ The prophetic poet, perhaps the earliest feminist, obviously wasn’t referring to the palace in Knossos of the revolting King Minos, that patriarchal creep.”
     “Sorry,” I said, trying to suck in my gut as I hiked up my saggy L. L. Bean cargo shorts. “Never heard of that poem. But thanks for enlightening me. Its opening line is a winner. I’ll be sure to add it to my file of the most memorable lines ever written, even if I doubt I’ll ever steal it. Can’t imagine how I could ever use it. Was that prophetic feminist poet famous in her time?”
     “She was anonymous,” Laura said, stepping into the water. “Like most women through the ages.”
     “I hear you,” I said, following her in, and wishing I hadn’t removed my Birkenstocks and socks as I felt my feet sink into the deep slimy mud. “Women have been screwed ever since that sexist snake seduced Eve, their voices silenced. My mother’s, unfortunately, was the one exception.”
     Laura turned and smiled. “I like you, Ben. I think we’re simpatico. You’re witty and cerebral yet sensitive, and the raw passion in your poetry moves me. Except, from what I’m hearing, echoed in that poem you read to our group yesterday, you seem unduly obsessed with mothers, yours in particular. And that does worry me, if we—"
     “I wouldn’t worry, she had good bones too. I just wish hers were a bit softer, and that she would’ve liked my poetry more, especially the poem I was most proud of and gave her as a Hanukkah gift.”
     “I can understand her reaction if it was anything like the one you read to our group: abstrusely passive-aggressive, yet with overtly bitter undertones about your relationship.”
     “No, that Hanukkah poem was quite different. I wrote it when I was just 12, not yet bitter, lost and maimed . . .  heart, body and soul. And it was the old-fashioned kind that would never be published, even self-published, today.”
     Laura laughed, splashing water at me. “Like mine? Comprehensible and unpretentious?”
     I splashed water back at her. “Yes, though perhaps you should lose the footnotes in yours.”
     “Are you flirting with me, Ben?”
     “Honestly, I don’t know. But what I do know is that my poem was also tender. It even rhymed, the sentiment and a few words admittedly borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson’s, To My Mother. So it really hurt when she read it and said, ‘For this I survived Auschwitz?’”
 
     A week later, to celebrate the end of the workshop, I took Laura out to dinner at La Peste en Rose, a charming French bistro. I’d picked it to please her, not simply because the owner obviously shared my love of Camus, Piaf and existential irony. While I sensed Laura wasn’t also a big fan of Absurdist Fiction, I had to conclude that, after seeing the T-shirt she’d removed when we went swimming, she at least loved Proust. On the front, in French Antique font, it read À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. On the back was a picture of Marcel dipping a madeleine in his cup of tea.
     Would this romantic dinner with her finally provide my long-sought madeleine moment?
     I passed Laura the pretty, blue-and-white pâté plate, but she waved it away, frowning. “Do you really think I’d eat the very symbol of Western civilization’s male-driven gluttony, debauchery and decline?”
     “Okay. How about we go straight to dessert, its symbolic, Eastern female-driven counterpart? I hear the madeleines at La Peste can’t be beat, allegedly based on the original Proust family recipe. Apocryphal, no doubt. I’m sure you know that Jeanne, Marcel’s mom, never cooked nor baked.”
     Laura nodded, running her long bony fingers through her short, spiky red hair. “A Jewish princess, from what I’ve read.”
     “I’d take one any day over the doozy I had for a mother, who never cooked either. A Jewish Marie Antoinette is more like it. Instead of cake she fed me Swanson TV Dinners every night, yet wouldn’t let me watch TV, not even the Micky Mouse Club. When I once told her I’d watched it at a friend’s house and liked the Mousketeers, she said, ‘That schlock, only the goyim watch, and those Mouseketeers, don’t trust, secret Nazis each and every one!’”       
     Laura laughed, weakly, then sat up straight. “I should tell you, Ben, before we get too involved, that I’m vegan, with a history of eating disorders and making bad choices.”
     I reached for the basket of French bread. “As in men? Or in diary-free alternatives to a traditional bagel schmear?”
     “As in choosing a lover who isn’t a complete loser. You should also know that I’m in the midst of a month-long grape cleanse . . . and my second mid-life crisis.”
     I picked up a slice of the warm, fragrant French bread, and spread some pâté thickly on it. “What was your first?”
    “In grad school, when I was trying to decide if I was bi.”
     I dropped the bread. “Oh. How’d that turn out? Should I order some grapes . . . red or white?”
     “Thanks, but I’m fasting today, feeling constipated. I went back and forth, male to female, as I switched my specialty in 19th century literature from the Russians to the French, then back again at least a dozen times, unable to decide which I liked the most.”
     I took a sip of Perrier, wishing I’d ordered whiskey. “And the final score? Still switch-hitting? AC/DC, so to speak. Archaically, I realize. But I’ve never understood its finer points, whether speaking electronically or sexually. I’ve never been good at baseball analogies, either. Maybe I’d be better if I’d had a father to play catch with. And I’ve never even tried phone sex or anonymous sex digitally, except with myself. I suppose I wouldn’t be so sexually repressed if my mother hadn’t once caught me masturbating while reading Tropic of Cancer. It didn’t help that she said, ‘If your shlong doesn’t get any bigger, Benjamin, you’ll end up shtupping only books.’”
     Laura stared at me. “Whew! Are you always like this on a date? Ranting like Woody Allen, but on steroids.”
     “Ignacius J. Reilly, I’d like to think. But only on first dates with intimidatingly brilliant women of the ambiguous sexual persuasion. How about some kombucha? It’s a wonderful digestive, and I have a nice little bottle in my car I always keep for special occasions like this.”
     Laura shook her head. “It’s fattening, and a product of but another civilization whose men through the ages kept women down, yet built it on their backs. There’s nothing ambiguous about that, nor about being bisexual. But since you asked, the final score was a draw. Vacillation has always been my weakness in matters of both the mind and the heart, though I did end up doing my dissertation on the sexual symbolism in the poetry of Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire.”
     “Implying that you prefer females?”    
     “Implying nothing of the sort, and that’s ancient history anyway. I don’t want to revisit it, disgusted with myself for having then perpetuated the patriarchal literary tradition I now detest. My second mid-life crisis is my only concern. It’s much more intense and complicated than the first. But what I have determined, finally, is that I’m asexual.”
     “Oh,” I said, then took a big bite of French bread, and began to choke.  
     “Are you alright?”
      I gulped down some Perrier, then wiped pâté off my lips. “Suggesting absolutely no sex whatsoever?”
     Laura nodded, reaching across the table and placing her hand gently on top of mine. “Will that be a problem, Ben? If it will, we can just be friends. Because I do understand it’s a lot to ask of you, of any man.”  
     “No problem at all,” I lied, wanting to say instead, “I could still be your secret Russian fuck buddy for old times’ sake, sexual identity and political correctness be damned!”
     Laura squeezed my hand. “Thank goddess! And you’ll be happy to hear that I’m the romantic kind of asexual, an ace of hearts . . . not the aromantic type, an ace of spades.”
     “I can’t honestly say hearing that makes me happy. But don’t get me wrong . . . I have nothing against aces of any kind, hearts or spades. Some of the greatest writers, musicians, artists and thinkers were asexual. Shaw, Chopin, Dali and Newton, for instance. And for the hoi polloi, there’s always Jughead Jones and SpongeBob.”
     “Have you forgotten all the great female aces of history? Oh, that’s right—they’re all anonymous.” Laura slammed her palm on the table. “And stop patronizing me! Why is everything a joke to you? Yet I never hear you laugh.”
     Feeling the familiar gut kick, I yanked my sweaty hand from under hers. “Should I cry instead? I wish I could but can’t. I know if I started I’d never stop. It’s all too much.”
     “What is?”
     “The absurdity of it all.”
     “The eternal pain of being?”
     “That, and the endless joy of reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy for the very first time.”    
     “Or, as Sartre put it so eloquently, Le néant hante l’entre.”
     “Or, as my mother put it so crudely, ‘Life’s one big schlep, God’s gift to us--his chosen people!’”
     Laura laughed. “I think you know I find you very attractive. You’re so—"
     “Pitiful?”
     “No, adorable and . . .  soulful.”
     “Me?” I looked away, then down, picked up the cloth napkin in my lap and tossed it at her.
     Smiling, she tossed it back. “Are you making a pass at me, Mr. Schwartz?”
     “God only knows, Ms. Bates, and he or she never talks to me. I do like you, but know nothing about asexuality, have no experience with aces. You’re the first.”
     “No wonder. We’ve always had to hide, made to think there was something horribly wrong with us. But finally we’re coming out, proud of who we are, and there’s millions of us out there about to change the world!”     
     “Go for it, Laura. Why not? Maybe you women, and you aces, can fix what us men, and us sexuaIs . . . or, in my case, quasi-sexual joker cards . . . have fucked up since the dawn of civilization. Sex is overrated anyway. And friends or lovers, we’ll always have Proust.”
     Laura stroked my hand. “You’re sweet, Ben and even better, honest. My first impression of you was prescient, when I sensed you were different than all the other men I’ve ever known.”
     “I am. My crisis has been lifelong, beginning when I was born, the very first time my mother looked at me and reportedly said to the attending doctor, ‘Oy veh, a mistake he is, I don’t want! But a discount on your delivery charge, that I want.’”
     “Sorry about that. She does sound like a real piece of work. But I think you managed to navigate your crises, or at least survive and find humor in them. And I think I’ve finally found a man who isn’t interested solely in sex!”
     “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, despite sex never doing much good for me, never being lucky in love.”
     Laura playfully nudged my foot under the table. “Maybe your luck is about to change. If you believe, or want to believe, there can be love . . . and I mean romantic love . . . without sex.”
     “Hard to believe and, anyhow, falling in love romantically is not what it’s cracked up to be, as my three marriages attest . . . when inevitably you end up with neither love nor sex.” 
     Laura smiled, pressing her foot against mine, and not at all aromantically. “But It happens all the time among aces. Did you know it sometimes even happens between aces and sexuals who have as much in common as you and I?”
     “If you say so. I wouldn’t know, the wrong person to ask about love. I couldn’t even express my feelings to the only one I know I wanted to love desperately despite our problems.”
     “Your mother, no doubt.”
     I nodded. “But I’d rather talk about my teddy bear. Freddy might’ve been a hard-ass too, and maybe we’d have bonded better if I’d had the sense to call him Shlomo instead of that goyish name. But at least he let me snuggle with him once in a while, and never ever bitched when I read my poetry out loud.”
      
     I suppose I shouldn’t complain about my pathetic love life—at least I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. Nothing, anyway, as crippling as Capote’s decade-long bout with it, nor as suicide-inducing as that experienced by Hemingway and Wallace.
      Truth be told, if I were to off myself it would be because I suffer from the very opposite of writer’s block: an inability to stop writing, despite knowing I should and get a real job. Right—and Mother Mary was a virgin!
     Maybe I should just smarten up and do what everyone and his or her mother does today: write a memoir and self-publish it, unashamed to share the boring details of their lives, thanks, some may say, to the success of My Struggle. I’d rather thank God that Karl had the decency to finally finish writing it, and spare us the misery of reading another mind-numbing installment.    
     I’ve never tried to write a memoir, or a ME-more, as I like it to call it. Perhaps that’s because I know better than to reveal the truth. My life hasn’t exactly been a memorable one, or brought me much happiness, other than fleetingly, such as that time I danced with, then kissed, the hottest girl in school, unaware that, as a result, I’d soon lose something far more precious than my innocence.
     I have, however, tried just about every other writing form and style, studied the techniques of all the masters, and I do pride myself on my work ethic and knowledge of literature. No wonder a former writing teacher once told me this: “You’re the most well-read, hardest working student I’ve ever known. You can write like anyone--except, unfortunately, yourself.”        
     While I’m on a roll enumerating my many flaws, I might as well spill all the beans and reveal the source of that lame simile in my opening sentence. I jacked it from a classic story in The Saturday Evening Post, dated November 16, 1957. The back cover is an ad for Betty Crocker’s New Mystery Fruitcake. I found the picture of that fruitcake far more appealing than the story in question, ‘Lady in Danger.” But then again it’s no mystery that I have peculiar tastes. I actually love fruitcake, the gift that everyone loves to hate. I eat it not just on Christmas, a holiday I don’t celebrate, but on Passover, when I bake my own with matzoh meal. So what if it's not kosher—I’m not either, just your everyday self-loathing Jew.      
     Around the time that folks first began to eat Betty Crocker’s New Mystery Fruitcake, I was eating a Hershey’s bar I’d bought at Abe’s candy story in Brooklyn. I was on my way to Hebrew school when I ran into my former grade school classmate, Tony Razzeri, who’d soon be on his way to reform school.
     I was preparing for my bar mitzvah. Tony was preparing for something else—and my life would never be the same again.
     I should’ve seen it coming. Tony had it in for me ever since he saw me French--or maybe Ashkenazi--kissing his ex-girlfriend, Connie Favioli, after dancing the cha-cha with her at the sixth-grade class dance. He then kicked my balls and punched my face, while I crumpled and just took it.
     Now Tony was leaning against the lamppost at the corner of Marcy and Hart, his big gold crucifix shining in the bright afternoon sun. He grinned at me as I crossed the street, heading straight toward him. 
     I’ve often wondered why I did. I’d like to think it was because I wanted to prove I wasn’t a coward. But I know that it’s much simpler. I’m the sort of schlemiel who always wants to believe that conflict builds character, then continually proves to himself that he’s wrong. I just love to suffer.    
     “Hey jewboy . . . pinch that candy bar?” Tony shouted, then took a long drag on his Lucky Strike.
     “Yeah, pinched it,” I lied, trying to maintain my pace as I approached him.
     “You’re full of shit.”
     “Stole it right in front of Abe’s eyes,” I said, surprised to hear myself continue to talk like a tough guy, yet liking how it felt.
     “Who the fuck you think you talking to!” 
     I stopped, now just a few feet from Tony, watching him finger his crucifix while my heart banged away beneath my gold Star of David.
     Tony lifted his crucifix off his chest. “Didn’t hear you. Speak up, hebe, or I’ll make you kiss this. I know you like to kiss.”
     Kiss my ass! I wanted to say. Instead I dropped the Hershey’s wrapper and just stood there, hands shaking, knowing it didn’t matter now what I said or did--it was already too late.
     Tony stood there, grinning, one hand now on his hip, the other behind his back. “On your way to yid school?”  
     “What’s it to you?” I said, repeating a line from the gangster movie, Baby Face Nelson, I’d just seen. But I didn’t like the way it made me feel, like I was about to shit my pants.
     “Did I hear you right, hymie? Guess you don’t remember that time I beat the shit out of you, and you did nothing.”
     “I was just a kid then, and now—"
     “You’re what? A man . . . Rocky Marciano?” Tony laughed as he tossed his cigarette in the gutter, then stepped off the curb toward me. ”If you are, show me, kike. But bet you’re too chicken like all the rest of ‘em.”
     God forbid I’d act like them, the nice Jewish boys in my ‘hood, who’d wisely shut their mouths and walk or even run away from Tony. But no, I acted like the real man I hoped to soon become once I was bar mitzvahed. I did what my soon-to-be idol, the macho Norman Mailer, no doubt would’ve done, or at least claim to have done.
     “Come and get it, wop!” I yelled, holding my ground with rubbery legs.   
     Tony jumped at me, his right hand still behind his back. I threw the first punch, a right hook, but Tony blocked it with his left arm and whipped his right around. I never saw the hatchet that severed my right arm at the elbow. 
     Yes, life threw me a nasty curveball (screwball?) that has taken its toll in ways both obvious and insidious, the latter unimaginable to a naïve teenager and still, sadly, unresolved more than half a century later as I, no wiser, continue to ponder the cruel irony in that innocent first kiss.
     Lucky, though, I’m a lefty, and that this seminal event in my life at least kept me out of Vietnam.
     I realize it’s unseemly to ask for pity, but screw that too. So, now that you know I’m not merely your run-of-the-mill loser, but a really old and certifiably disabled motherfucker, go ahead and feel sorry for me if you like.
     Still, you’d think by now I’d have figured out how to make my writing sound authentic. That  long ago I’d have dumped like dancing popcorn, and had the guts to use instead like a Jew dancing in sea of despair. After all, I’m not just a lifelong learner but, since retiring, something even better: a creative writing instruction junkie. I’ve attended 37 workshops and 29 conferences, not to say more emerging writers retreats in exotic locales than I care to count.
     I’m not sure why I always get invited. Sure, I keep hearing I have lots of natural talent and potential. But at this age I don’t really qualify as a so-called emerging writer. In fact, I remain fully submerged. Perhaps what they really appreciate is that I have lots of discretionary funds, not to mention that I’m a sucker for emotional self-abuse, both of which I can thank my dear mother for.
     The one-and-only Sylvia was the proprietor of Sylvia’s Discount Wigs, a popular hangout for the Orthodox Jewish women of Crown Heights, where she was known as the Sheitel Macher of Brooklyn. Indeed, she was such a force of nature that even the Big Macher must’ve been in awe of her and her twisted Yinglish syntax, though my mother called herself simply the Cheap Wig Lady. Yes, that selfless woman who never even liked wigs nor, for that matter, Orthodox Judaism, especially its men, would never let me forget how much she’d sacrificed so I wouldn’t have to suffer as she had.
     And then there are the words of encouragement she once gave me that I now wish I could forget: “Sholem Aleichem you’re not, my boychik. But if nothing else, an original at least you are.”
     She offered this backhanded compliment after reading the draft of the speech I was required to give at the conclusion of my bar mitzvah ceremony. It was an excerpt from my first piece of serious writing: a three act play in the mode of the then-trendy Theater of the Absurd. Sure, I’d modeled it after Waiting for Godot, and astute readers no doubt would’ve recognized Beckett’s voice in it. Still, I swear I didn’t steal a single word of his. Well, I suppose I did paraphrase one famous line: People are bloody ignorant apes. But many folks have said much the same thing about our species and weren’t accused of plagiarism.    
     In the first act of Howling with Alan, Mr. Ginsburg, my favorite poet at the time, appears on stage as a precocious teenager alongside his elderly rabbi. They engage in a Socratic monologue, so to speak. Alan poses questions, then answers them himself, arguing that since God is dead there’s no reason to be bar mitzvahed. The rabbi stares at him, speechless. Alan then begins to howl uncontrollably. The rabbi strokes his long white beard. In the second act, the dizzying dissonant tones of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners” fill the theater, but absolutely nothing else—absurd or otherwise—happens. Indeed, the curtain remains closed throughout. In the final act, Alan and the rabbi reappear, the former howling again. The rabbi now finds this funny, appreciates its subtle irony, and begins to laugh hysterically, repeating over and over to Alan--this act’s sole line of dialogue—"Please stop, you’re killing me!”       
      At the last emerging writers retreat I attended, in Machu Picchu, I might’ve been better off submitting Howling with Alan than Digging Clams with One Hand Only. Andrew, the writing teacher who critiqued it, had a take on my originality that wasn’t nearly as encouraging as my mother’s. 
      I suppose I should’ve seen that coming too when, as Andrew passed me back Digging Clams, he said, “I think you could use a cocktail, Ben.”
     “Now? Before breakfast? Do I look that bad? I know I haven’t shaved or changed my shirt since I got it here a week ago. And I did stay up late last night revising the opening line of my piece . . . again. But--”   
     “You look fine, Ben. I just thought it would settle your nerves. I know how these one-on-one sessions can affect students. And I’m referring to a drink that’s hard to resist, the legendary Pisco Sour that Hemingway loved! Some say he invented it, though even I, a big Hemingway fan, believe that’s apocryphal. But what isn’t is that Peru’s national drink is infused with the essence of coca leaves, the secret, some also say, behind Papa’s prodigious feat of catching a 1700- pound marlin when he visited Peru during the filming of The Old Man and the Sea.”
     “Seven hundred pounds is more like it, from what I read. Regardless, thanks for the offer, Andrew, I think I’ll pass. I just took my first oxy of the day.” 
     “I insist,” he said. “The Pisco Sours are superb here at the Belmond Sanctuary Lodge, no matter the time of day.”
     Andrew slid a glass across the table toward me, then filled his from the handsome, hand-painted ceramic pitcher of Pisco Sours that always seemed to magically appear whenever writers at the retreat gathered to pursue their craft—or talk about it, anyway.
     I shook my head as I covered the glass with my stump—or nub, as some of us like to call it.
     “Sorry, don’t care for mixed drinks, they’re a tad too girly for me, and you’d think a Pisco Sour would’ve been for Papa too.”
     Andrew lifted his glass to his mouth, then put it down. He stared at me, my nub. “Not to be nosy, Ben, but how come you don’t wear a prosthetic? It must be hard to write on a computer with only one hand, slow at any rate.”
     “I guess you could call me a purist. Like my whiskey straight, coffee black and body real, if not as real as the tsuris I knew growing up with a mother who made Sophie Portnoy look good. And writing for me is hard and slow any which way I do it--though much easier and faster than digging clams with one hand only.”
     Andrew glanced at my Digging Clams piece on the table. “Speaking of which, I also wanted to ask you if your story was intended to be a final draft.”
     “No, it’s just my first . . . my rough . . . very rough draft,” I lied. “What the hell, pour me a drink! And while I’m at it I might as well take another pain pill. Today’s as good a day as any to die, as Crazy Horse liked to say.”
     Andrew filled my glass, embossed with the resort’s logo depicting an Inca maiden, resplendent in a feathered headdress, drinking from a golden goblet filled with what must be, I deduced, the legendary Pisco Sour.
     Andrew raised his glass, reached out and tapped mine. “I prefer to say it in a more original way . . . Heghlumeh Qaq Jajvan.”
     I washed the oxy down with a sip of my Pisco Sour. “Is that Incan?”
     “No, it’s Klingon, from Star Trek.”
     “Are you a Trekkie?”
    “Hardly. I’m a Yalie and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”
     We sat next to each other at a stylish conference table of richly grained, exotic hardwood, no doubt harvested illegally from virgin stands in the Amazon. I gazed past the young, good-looking Andrew, dressed as always all in black, his dark, neatly-trimmed Baldo beard nicely complementing his pale round face and thin lips. Out the big picture window behind him rose the majestic ancient Inca citadel, packed as always with tourists taking selfies and wandering off the paths, no doubt destroying the place. The pain pills were kicking in. I took another sip of my cocktail, thinking how lucky I was to be here, knowing I could be back home in Tucson suffering instead, sweltering to death in the dreaded monsoon season. And, who knows, maybe I was misinterpreting the implication in Andrew’s “final draft” question.   
      I picked up Digging Clams and leafed through it, surprised—no, shocked--that there wasn’t a single correction or comment!
      When I looked up, Andrew’s eyes and mouth were open wide. A concerned look that reminded me of the one I often see on the faces of people--women mostly--when they first recognize I’m a crip--as some of us call ourselves. Could it be he was feeling sorry for me? I certainly hoped so. But if he was, you’d think the arrogant bastard would’ve written something nice in the margins of my manuscript! A happy face, if nothing else, with an arrow pointing to a clever word, simile or metaphor.  
     Andrew emptied his glass, then cleared his throat. “I’m going to be completely honest with you and not pussyfoot around, because I like you, Ben, I truly do. Hopefully this will spare you the grief of further revision. Don’t bother. I know good writing when I read it, and this isn’t it.”
     Good or not, Digging Clams remains my favorite among the tragicomedies comprising the bulk of my oeuvre to date, and I’m damn proud of it, especially the 18th draft Andrew was dissing, begun shortly after my last divorce ten years earlier. I completely revised the story then, using a far more mature voice and adding a new subtitle, An Altacocker’s Cautionary Tale, to capture my newfound wisdom: digging clams, even with two hands, is not what it seems. It’s more like falling in love with the wrong person then having to dig your way out of the deep muddy mess you’ve made of your life, while knowing that not even the likes of Mike Mulligan’s legendary steam shovel could save you.
     This cautionary tale is loosely based on my brief career as a commercial fisherman, my seventh consecutive unsuccessful attempt at making a living when I was young and chasing experience, what all aspiring writers are supposed to do so as to have the material to write honestly. This was before I became a high school English teacher and discovered my true calling, the only thing I’m honestly any good at: teaching others what I’ve yet to master.  
     Nevertheless, I have been around the block enough times to know I’m not the only teacher with that shortcoming. I wanted to tell Andrew, that pompous asshole, “What you’re really saying is you know what you like . . . hearing yourself talk and repeating what you were taught at school to like.”  
      But, following the recommended etiquette of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I politely said instead, “How come you think it’s a piece of shit? In a word, fakakta, what my mother called everything I ever did.” 
     “Regrettably, it has neither a discernible plot nor any narrative arc to speak of, offers nothing that’s thought provoking nor emotionally evocative, and the characters are neither credible nor likable. Finally, while I clearly heard echoes, both thematically and stylistically, of Melville in Moby Dick, the fact remains that digging crustaceans, symbolically or metaphorically, is scarcely in the same league as hunting the great sperm whale.”  
     “Is that all? Glad you liked it so much, Andrew. But surely it has some redeeming feature . . . made you laugh a time or two. Christ, I’ve been working on it for years!”
     “Believe me, Ben, if I really thought it had I’d be the first to tell you. The main problem is simply that your writing doesn’t sound authentic, like your true voice.”
     I glared at Andrew. “How can anyone honestly know what their true voice is? And if I can’t, how can you?”
      Andrew averted his gaze, drummed his fingers on the table. “I agree, that does sound paradoxical, if not oxymoronic, undoubtedly because it’s one of those things that’s best not intellectualized. Skilled editors and critics, however, can just intuit it. Be that as it may, you’re making this far too complicated, the flaw common to emerging writers. Writing’s not hard. All you have to do is sit down at a computer and bleed.”
     “That doesn’t sound very original, your true voice,” I wished I’d said to him.
     But I did have the balls to look the phony straight in the eye and say, “That sounds awfully familiar. A lot of good all that bleeding did for Papa in the end, when he put a shotgun to his head.”
     “But think of what treasures we’d have lost if he hadn’t bled like Abraham’s sacrificial lamb!”
     I thought of telling the wimp I knew a thing or two about bleeding—the authentic gushing sort—but figured he was too squeamish to hear even a sanitized version of how I ended up digging clams with one hand only.
     So, instead I said, “It was a ram, not a lamb, that Abraham sacrificed.”
    “I only studied the Bible as literature, and sheep confuse me, the many names used to distinguish their differences . . . horned, castrated, shorn, pregnant, lactating and the like.”
    “But I bet your hero did, knew sheep very well, perhaps even in the biblical sense, except toward the end when he was so farblondget he probably shot a few, thinking they were his enemies or ex-wives.”
     Andrew sighed. “Go ahead and make fun of him, everyone does today. They’re just jealous of the life he lived, to the full. And all geniuses are easy targets, with their many peccadilloes. Victor Hugo wrote naked when he needed to meet a deadline. And Dan Brown hangs upside down when suffering from writer’s block, which isn’t to suggest I think that hack’s a genius. Papa’s old war wounds just caught up with him in the end, that’s all.”
     “Or was it more that his mother made him dress like a girl when he was a kid?”
     Andrew poured himself another Pisco Sour, put his elbows on the table, his head propped in his hands, and stared at his glass, an odd look on his face that for some reason worried me. Did he still have another bombshell to drop? Had he told the retreat’s organizer that my writing sucked so bad I shouldn’t be invited to next year’s event?
     Not that I was planning to attend. It was going to be at al-Mashtal, the new 5-Star destination resort in the Gaza Strip, not exactly my favorite place on earth. And not only wouldn’t the staff appreciate my sense of humor, but I wouldn’t be able to wear my lucky writing charm, my Star of David. I won’t go anywhere without it. My mother gave it to me at my bar mitzvah. It had belonged to my uncle Sam, her brother who’d been murdered by the Nazis. When I told Sylvia at the after-party that I’d decided to become a writer, she reminded me that Sam also had that ambition, and then said, as she put his Star of David around my neck: “Mazel tov and enjoy! May it bring it you more luck than it did him.”
     While I have been luckier than Sam, I can’t say that his Star of David has brought me much luck as a writer. After all, the most encouraging response I’ve ever received from a lit mag was a form rejection letter with this line: “Regrettably, we cannot use any of your stories, but please send us more, and the next time you do we’ll gladly discount the submission fee and a subscription to our award-winning magazine”. 
     So, I’m sure you’re wondering why I call it my lucky writing charm, and why I didn’t toss the damn thing long ago. Perhaps because, with my luck, someone would find and return it. Or maybe the truth is I wear my lucky writing charm all the time because it reminds me of my mother, who I do miss terribly. Odd, I know, considering what she did to me, if that’s what fucked me up but good.
     Even odder is that I know she loved me more than anyone ever has; she just had a hard time showing it, and when she did I often wished she hadn’t.
     Tony maimed me too, and in the process cut off more than my arm. But he and Sylvia aren’t the only ones who made me who I am: an emotional crip. I have to blame myself, and believe me I do in my weak moments—24/7. As an adult I’ve never exactly excelled at showing love, either. Before that fight with Tony at least I tried to express that I wanted love. Such as when I showed Sylvia my fourth-grade report card, then broke down and cried.
     “What’s wrong?” Sylvia asked. “Your grades . . . unhappy with them, like me?”
     “I don’t want to go to school anymore. I’m afraid one of those hoods is going to kill me.”
     “Afraid of them? They’re nothing, and dying’s no different. Always remember, Benjamin, it could be much worse. You could get another A-minus in math, catch polio and end up in an iron lung.”
      I can live with the loss of half an arm and the pain of a lifetime of rejection, both from all the women in my life and all the lit mags.
     What hurts the most is never having said to Sylvia these three simple words—"I love you.”  
     And the truth is I’ve decided not to attend another fucking emerging writers retreat--no matter where the hell it is! Well, maybe I would if it were in walking distance of the Wailing Wall, which is my favorite place on earth. Not that this should surprise you. But perhaps this will, what Andrew all along had up the sleeve of his black T-shirt.     
      Andrew stopped staring at his glass and turned to me. “Before joining the others at the craft lecture, I wanted to discuss a personal . . .  ask a personal question, if you don’t mind.” 
     I scratched my stump. “Shoot,” I said, despite worrying he was going to ask me something truly personal, like Laura did--why I make everything into a joke, yet never laugh or, even worse, why I scratch my stump so much, yet never cry.
     Andrew licked his lips, then took a sip of his second—maybe third--Pisco Sour of the morning. “Have you ever considered hiring a story doctor?”
     “You mean, you? You’re a ghostwriter?”
     “I prefer the term doctor.”
     “Understandable. Everyone does, quacks particularly.”
     “I’ll have some free time after the retreat, a couple of weeks before classes resume at NYU. If you don’t know, my manuscript doctoring skills are highly regarded in the profession, and short stories are my specialty.”
     “Don’t bother, Andrew. I realize revising it myself may cause me further grief, but I don’t mind suffering. Anyway, I’d rather keep searching for my true voice. Well, fuck that voice! What I really want is just to write a goddamn good story.”
     Andrew took a long swig. “Are you sure you won’t let me make it more publishable?”
     “Positive,” I said, scratching that spot on my nub that always seems to itch when others say things that make me uncomfortable, such as what my mother used to say whenever I scratched it: Not even a shikse will ever want you if she sees you doing that!”
     Andrew looked past me, at the back wall featuring a mural of the legendary scene of the Inca emperor Atahualpa meeting the conquistador Pizarro—who later had him strangled.
     “I’m embarrassed to say this, Ben, but I could use the money right now. You know how poorly they pay adjunct faculty, and I don’t have to tell you that what the lit mags pay is a joke. But what isn’t is the alimony I have to pay my ex, that failed poet, that dilettantish literary snob who also took my prized leather bound set of the Great Books, and my first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
     “I hear you, though none of my exes ever asked for money from me, or took anything of value, such as my prized set of vintage Saturday Evening Post’s. My guess is they just wanted to get away from me as fast as possible. But I do wish one or the other had taken Freddy. Sonia, for instance, ex number two and a shrink, who had a furry fetish and liked to cuddle with him more than with me. For the life of me, I don’t why I’ve yet to offload that snobbish schlub of a teddy bear.”
     Andrew massaged his temples. “Would you consider instead giving me a loan . . . a high interest one?”
     I shook my head, then scratched it, which is never as satisfying as scratching that spot on my nub that sometimes drives me crazy, my phantom itch, as Sarah, ex number three, liked to call it. Sarah, like my mother, found that peccadillo of mine thoroughly unattractive. However, when we first hooked up, she told me she found my stump erotic. Then, as time went by, not so sexy, apparently, when she finally left me for her full-bodied personal trainer.
     “I promise I’ll pay you back,” Andrew said, slopping another drink into his glass. “I’m good for it, just ask any of my colleagues or students. I’ll even throw in this great little piece I wrote a few years ago that for some reason I never could get published.”
     “I hope you’re not suggesting I’m the kind of writer who’d shamelessly steal the blood that others have spilled.”
     Andrew reached for the pitcher, then pulled back his now-shaking hand. “The truth is . . .  lately . . . I’ve been contemplating killing myself.”
     “Been there myself, and more than once,” I said, wiggling my stump, and visualizing my friends in junior high, when I returned, stare at it then look away. “My old war wound that’s never healed.”
     “I don’t have as good an excuse.” Andrew closed his eyes and tapped the top of his head. “But mine also festers . . . no matter what I do . . . I can’t take it anymore.” 
     I quickly filled his glass. He took just a little sip this time, then dropped his head on the table and began to cry. I scooted over closer to him and stroked his shoulder with my nub. I felt my eyes well up, remembering all the times I’d wished my mother would’ve stroked my stump. 
     With my other hand I reached into my pocket and pulled out a bunch of pain pills. “Here, kid, take a couple of these,” I said, dropping a few on the table. “Trust me, they’ll make you feel  better, even if they don’t always work for me anymore. But I know they did for my ex number one, at least toward the end of our marriage, when Miriam would always take a couple right before we went to bed. ‘Why?’ I once asked her. ‘To dull the pain,’ she said. ‘In case you insist on having sex. Not that I really need them. I don’t feel anything with or for you anymore, but don’t take it personally.’”
     Andrew stopped sobbing and glanced up, then buried his face in his hands. I removed my nub from his shoulder.
     “Me, take it—anything--personally? Epistemologically perhaps, but always painfully. And following in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen, my favorite poet at that time, I went to live at the same place he once did—Mount Baldy Zen Center. There, despondent like my hero, I tried to forget her and find myself. Instead I found my muse in Leonard and wrote poems night and day, meditative songs like his, and in his soulful voice, I can’t deny. Only mine, such as So Long, Miriam, were even more personal and depressing than his and, looking back, horrific.”
     Andrew raised his head, wiped his eyes, glanced at the pills. “Take these with liquor? Isn’t that a sure way to kill yourself?”
     “Maybe on an empty stomach. But Papa did it all the time and, as you said, look what he created. Still, I’ll take the Beats any day over him. What they wrote changed not just literature, but the world! Where would we be today without the likes of Naked Lunch and A Coney Island of the Mind? I doubt we’d have what they spawned: Dylan, gay rights, the sexual revolution and, of course, condom-free sex. ‘Hallelujah!’ I can hear the boys sing in the streets. But not like Leonard did, and even if I never joined in. Using rubbers was never my shtick. I’m sterile. Or, to put it more accurately as my mother did when I proudly showed her my PhD diploma in comparative literature from Harvard: ‘If you had any beytsin--balls—my boychik, something of yourself you’d make. A real doctor, what I need now--not this. Because I’m dying!’”   
     “You’re dreaming, nothing’s changed. Just look at who’s now running our country—Agent Orange, a fascist, racist and misogynist--and at the best-selling novel of the past decade--Fifty Shades of Grey. And you’re also wrong about Papa.” Andrew ran his forefinger around the rim of his glass. “He was just an alcoholic . . .  like me.”
     I tapped my temple, remembering the pain shooting through it, and seeing Sylvia frown that day she found me drunk, lying in a pool of vomit on my bedroom floor. “Been there too. Now I’m just a drug addict.”
     “And a fool, still addicted to the illusion that On the Road is actually literature, and that Dylan deserved a Nobel Prize. As for Ginsburg, that judge erred mightily in acquitting him. He should have sent him to prison. But not for his use of obscenities in Howl—for his obscenely inarticulate use of the English language!”  
     “We obviously have different tastes, but there is one thing we do have in common that also should be obvious.”
     Andrew smiled, slightly. “What, that we’re both fucked up?”
     With my good arm I punched his shoulder playfully. “Yes, we’re both meshuga with more mishegas than we need, and can use all the help we can get.”
     Andrew nodded, reaching for an oxy and mumbling, Heghlumeh Qaq Jajvan.
     I grabbed the pill with my left hand, then swept the others off the table with my stump. “I don’t want you to kill yourself, Andrew. I want you to get off your high Iowa Writers’ Workshop horse, and help me, for fuck’s sake. I’m not emerging, I’m drowning!”
     “Well, I was being honest about your story. Do yourself a favor and dump it. But you do have what very few of my students have—natural talent.”
     “Right—and potential. A lot of good either’s ever done me. And look closely at me, Andrew.” He stared at my nub. “No, not that.” I pointed to my face. “This, my wrinkles--I’m running out of fucking time!”
     “There’s still time. You just have to move on to something fresh, the kind of story you’ve never tried before.”
     “Such as?”
     “For starters, forget everything us writing teachers have been telling you. Stop trying so hard to be original: that’s impossible, everything’s already been said. The single most important thing: be yourself when you write!”
     “And who’s that?”
     Andrew smiled. “The kind of person you can’t help but love!”
     “A schlemiel, I think you’re saying. Or maybe a schmendrick or a schmegegge. If not, then a schlimazel with a PhD.”
     Andrew laughed. “Or the hundreds of other similarly wonderful words, not to say a few choice ones you Jews use in a voice all your own. Ironic, clever and funny, yet sad, soulful and profound.”
     “Profound, as in Duck Soup, Bananas or Spaceballs?”
     “As in the great American Jewish novels, The Adventures of Augie March or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or American Pastoral--take your pick. And stop yanking my chain! You know as well as I that no one else uses them quite like your peeps to capture the essence of being human, and to make us laugh, especially at ourselves.”
     “I’ve been called all those choice words--by my mother--yet don’t recall ever laughing.”
     “But I’m sure your readers will if you just be yourself.”
     “My mother, a balabuste extraordinaire, had other ideas about the wisdom of that except, perhaps, at the end.”
      “The end?”
      “Right before she died, the first time I’d cried since losing my arm, when Sylvia kissed my stump, the first time ever, and said, ‘My son the writer, I’m proud of you!’”
      “Her last words? That’s touching. Closure on an unambiguously positive note.”
      “No, not quite and not her final words. Sylvia had closed her eyes, her mouth pulled back into that familiar twisted smile for the very last time. Then she whispered, ‘My last favor, Benjamin, do me, please, when you write . . .  promise you won’t be yourself.’”
     “And you promised her that?”
     I nodded. “And I’ve kept my promise ever since, to show her what I never could when she was alive.”
    “That you loved her? I get that, but not the way you show it. It’s crazy. Sick. She’s dead, for Chrissake, and you’re just torturing yourself.”
     I scratched my stump. “Maybe, but it makes me feel good.”  
     “What . .  . guilt . . . repressed anxiety? Bullshit!”
     “Please, spare me the psychobabble.”
     I reached to scratch my stump, but stopped, feeling another familiar pain, only this one was as real as Tony’s bloody hatchet. I pushed my chair back and stood.
     Andrew looked up, his brows knitted. “What’s wrong?”
     “My sciatica’s killing me!”
     “From the look in your eyes I’d say it’s something else. A ghost you’re seeing and don’t want to? Maybe you could finally face it and let it out when you write, and then—”
     “Bleed? I can’t . . . there’s nothing left inside.”
     “Your suffering shtick is getting real old. And if you ask me your mother was pulling your leg, sarcastically, maybe even affectionately, just as you do with me and probably everyone else. Your defense mechanism? Not that mine, tearing others down, is any better.”
     I collapsed in my chair. “But at least you’re not toiten bankes, an utter failure.”
     “You’re not either, if you’d ever listen to yourself.”
     “What are you talking about?”
     “What I’ve been hearing all morning, your true voice I sense! You break your promise to her every fucking time you speak. Now, all you have to do is use that voice when you write!”
     I closed my eyes and turned away, seeing Sylvia kiss my stump. “If only it was that simple.”
     Andrew put his arm around me. “I’m not saying it is. Only that it’s time to let it . . . her . . . go. What have you got to lose? As you said, you’re drowning.”
     I dropped my head on his shoulder. “Pathetic,” I muttered between sobs. “Sorry.”
     Andrew gently stroked my stump. “Don’t be sorry, be who you really are, and this is a good start. Much better than killing yourself.”
    I lifted my head off his shoulder, took a deep breath. “Thanks, I needed that, owe you one.”
    Andrew removed his hand from my stump, stroked his beard, and grinned. “Now, about that loan.”