Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake Roger Siebert
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake Roger Siebert Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT BLUEBERRY PANCAKE By ROGER SIEBERT A thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006 Copyright © 2006 Roger Siebert All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Roger Siebert defended on November 6, 2006. ______________________________ Virgil Suárez Professor Directing Thesis ______________________________ James Kimbrell Committee Member ______________________________ Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Victoria iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to all my professors at Florida State University, with particular thanks to Virgil Suárez, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and James Kimbrell for their work on this thesis. Virgil took a gamble by volunteering to be my major professor without having seen any of my fiction before, and all three willingly took on a thesis two or three times the normal length—while Jimmy and Elizabeth were on official sabbatical, no less. I asked a lot from Virgil, Jimmy, and Elizabeth, and they all delivered without hesitation. Thank you, too, my fellow English Department graduate students, especially Matt Hobson, Brook Steingass, and Quentin James, who read early drafts of this thesis and provided insightful comments that were key in my finding out what this story was really about. I’m grateful, too, to the staff of The Southeast Review, who, while I sat with them reading and discussing submissions, made comments (positive and negative) on others’ fiction that taught me as much about storytelling as my course work did. Thanks, too, to the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Graduate Studies, and Florida State University in general for offering me the opportunity to study creative writing at their program, one of the nation’s finest, as well as to the First-Year Writing Program, which granted me a teaching assistantship, without which I would not have been able to accept that offer to study. And finally, thanks to all my students, who taught me through their work that, no matter how long and hard a person pursues trying to create art, that pursuit should never be taken so seriously that we forget to write stories that are just plain fun to read. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract..................................................................vii Chapter 1 .................................................................1 Chapter 2 .................................................................6 Chapter 3 ................................................................10 Chapter 4 ................................................................23 Chapter 5 ................................................................26 Chapter 6 ................................................................29 Chapter 7 ................................................................31 Chapter 8 ................................................................37 Chapter 9 ................................................................40 Chapter 10................................................................44 Chapter 11................................................................48 Chapter 12................................................................63 Chapter 13................................................................65 Chapter 14................................................................71 Chapter 15................................................................77 Chapter 16................................................................82 Chapter 17................................................................85 Chapter 18................................................................89 Chapter 19...............................................................101 Chapter 20...............................................................103 Chapter 21...............................................................110 Chapter 22...............................................................116 Chapter 23...............................................................119 Chapter 24...............................................................127 Chapter 25...............................................................129 v Chapter 26...............................................................131 Chapter 27...............................................................135 Chapter 28...............................................................148 Chapter 29...............................................................151 Chapter 30...............................................................152 Chapter 31...............................................................159 Chapter 32...............................................................170 Chapter 33...............................................................176 Chapter 34...............................................................181 Chapter 35...............................................................183 Chapter 36...............................................................184 Chapter 37...............................................................190 Chapter 38...............................................................196 Chapter 39...............................................................200 Chapter 40...............................................................205 Chapter 41...............................................................208 Chapter 42...............................................................209 Chapter 43...............................................................211 Chapter 44...............................................................213 Chapter 45...............................................................216 Chapter 46...............................................................221 Chapter 47...............................................................225 Chapter 48...............................................................227 Chapter 49...............................................................229 Chapter 50...............................................................233 Chapter 51...............................................................242 Biographical Sketch........................................................245 vi ABSTRACT Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake is the fictional story of John Smith—an ex-cook depressed with the superficiality of his ninety-hour-per-week job managing a high-end cigar bar and disenchanted with what he thought would be a perfect romance—who flees Denver hoping to reach the comfort of his sister’s home and tiny café on the Gulf. He’s hit with a snowstorm in the middle of the night, and he feels sorry for and picks up Ed MacGuffin, a hitchhiking murderer on the lam who is in search of a recipe for the perfect blueberry pancake. John’s pickup breaks down in the snowstorm and leaves the two on foot, and John and Ed are thrown into a bizarre and sometimes violent trek across half the country. When they meet Sam, a moving-truck driver, and Gavin, Sam’s loader, John begins to fall in love with Sam, and Sam’s sexual ambiguity forces John to try to come to terms with himself and his pop-culture–driven expectations. All along the way, John learns about Ed, Sam, himself, and the dangers of believing anything can be perfect. vii CHAPTER 1 At two in the morning, the snowfall thickened and swarmed so furiously in John’s headlights that every sign of anyone else in the world vanished. Other cars’ tracks in the snow vanished. I-70 itself vanished. Quarter-sized flakes attacked John and his pickup like nuclear fallout or bleached-out volcanic ash. Bits flung themselves in on him through the pickup’s cracked-open side windows. Icy crystals stuck in his hair and eyebrows, dusted his vinyl gym bag on the seat next to him, and covered the floorboard two inches thick. John’s breaths came in short gulps and burst out in clouds onto the windshield, where they froze in a thin sheen because of his broken defroster. John had wanted to leave everyone behind, to disappear, but this, he thought, was too much. Denver was done, or rather, he was done with it: the town, the job, love, everything. Now he was pointed toward his big sister’s in the Florida panhandle, and he hadn’t even let her know he was coming. He hoped he would be welcome. The top edges of John’s loafers touched his ankles stiff and cold through his dress socks. He wished he had worn wool socks, or cotton, or at least owned a pair of boots. His ankles felt naked. He wiggled his toes and stamped his left foot into the snow on the floorboard just in front of the seat. Then he switched feet on the gas pedal and stamped his right foot next to the hump over the transmission. John hoped his memory was accurate, that Pamela and Kevin had one of those perfect relationships, a sense of contentedness he could bask in and leech off of, but he was afraid that his impression had come from some simpler association, like the scents of simmering gumbo or frying bacon that always