BLACK DOLPHIN a Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in Partial
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BLACK DOLPHIN A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by James David Bergsten May, 2014 © Copyright All rights reserved Thesis written by James D. Bergsten B.A., Miami University, 2010 Approved by Imad Rahman, MFA, Advisor Eric Wasserman, MFA, Committee Member Robert Miltner, Ph.D., Committee Member Robert Trogdon, Ph.D., Chair, Department of English Raymond A. Craig, Ph.D., Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….iv I. PART I……………………………………………………………………………….1 The Writer – Chapter I…………………………………………………………………….2 Black Dolphin – Chapter I: Vigo & Simone…………………………....………………..25 The Writer – Chapter II………………………………………..………..………………..70 Alexei………………………………………………………..…………..……………….81 The Writer – Chapter III……………………………………..…………..………………98 Black Dolphin – Chapter II: Alain & Lola……………..………………..……………..119 The Writer – Chapter IV……………………..……………………………..…………..155 II. PART II…………………………………………………………………………...158 iii Acknowledgements: To my mother & father, You gave me life. Without you, I would be nothing. To my best friend Damon, Your support and friendship were invaluable to me. Thank you, my friend. And to Em, my lover and companion, You are the reason I still feel love in this horrible world of ours. iv 1 Part I – There is no such thing as real life. 2 The Writer April, 2013. Akron, Ohio. Manic pixie girls were verboten – in life and in fiction. He’d sworn himself off them. They were aloof quirky disasters with bad personalities and even worse hang-ups. They seemed to thrive on making him miserable with love, his doubts and fear of abandonment a sweet, life- preserving nectar they needed to slurp up with blithe, forked tongues. He resolved at the start of the summer to stay away from them forever and to never, ever write about them again. Besides the pixie girls, it was difficult to channel his daily experiences into his writing when his daily experiences only ran the gambit of microwaving egg-rolls and reading Guy Debord or The Coming Insurrection in his squat, dank little studio apartment after work, waiting for the Fall semester to start. In his apartment he fought a constant battle against mold. Crevices taunted him with musty smells and speckled growths. Mold clambered onto his shoes and up the walls. He clutched a spray bottle like a truncheon and a wet rag like a shield and tried not to breathe too deeply. The spores encroached on him at night. He turned on fans and ran his a/c to combat the humidity. The spinning dial of his electric meter whirred in the darkness. In the morning, he would take the highway to work and the sun would be lolling above the city, burning fiery red in its long slog upward – casting light down, burning his eyes, illuminating the brittle corners of buildings and splaying the shadows of smokestacks. An incredible sense of feeling would fall over him – lost in that same instant with the pull of traffic. Tiny ants were crushed under the weight of the day, scurrying from here to there. 3 Bowery and Lakeshore – dirty lake and soot-filled fish – the unfit milieu of morning traffic merged together. The morning sun humbled him. The commute? Cut off in his mind from the destination. It was the only time he felt completely free to have static thought – which eluded him anyway. He wondered how many times he had passed by these same cars – these same people. The chances were slim but he wondered all the same and felt sad because he would never know. Death and danger were trusting strangers in expensive coffins-on-wheels. He let loose and drove to work. 4 * The writer had been born near Syracuse, New York in 1988. His mother had cradled him in swaddled cloth. A picture in a photo album. He’d been born two weeks early and two weeks later his family moved to Ohio – his mother, father, and toddler sister. In his memories of his early childhood, he distinctly remembered the sun and how it would shine – a shine that lost its luster in the inertia of years. In two years’ time, a second sister was born. Play sets and cable television. Nickelodeon and a Hewlett-Packard computer. Dial-up. VHS tapes. A wooden toy box. A half-finished basement. A fridge full of food. A backyard with thick, green grass. Neighbor boys to play with. A school close by. Lessons from dad at the dinner table. Being cradled in his mother’s arms. The first day of pre-school – he cried. 5 * Women had always been somewhat baneful to his existence. His fondness for them, a bit of a paradox. As a boy, he’d never believed in cooties. He was drawn to girls. Their presence sending jelly through his bones and warming his heart. But he was short for his age – the growth spurt would not come until Junior High – and this marked him for many years and girls paid him no mind. This rejection made his desire to be liked by girls all the more intense. Reciprocated love could demonstrate his worth – something everyone would see. Years passed. Hormones started to fill his body. The girls were turning into women. He still couldn’t talk to them. High School. And it happened. His first girlfriend, S, had been four years his senior. S had long bleach-blonde hair, and had told him in the backseat of her car that his cock was big and that skinny guys like him always had big cocks. She added that there is such a thing as ‘too big’ and then jerked him off right there, parked in the driveway of her grandmother’s house. She took his virginity a month later when he was sixteen. He sulked around for a year after she’d dumped him. Later, in college, he fell in love with a short little red-haired art student with squirrel-ish cheeks and a can-do spirit – L. She made him bracelets out of found items or let him fuck her on the couch in her parent’s basement or they went to the movies and held hands. From canvas to 6 canvas, bed sheet to bed sheet, story to story – they found themselves inseparable. They went to parks and dipped their feet in cool water or went to the mall and made faces at all the wasted money. He told her he loved her more times than he could remember. They dropped acid a few times and felt gangly-weird kissing and fucking – laughing, crashing through daily life. No one could tell them anything that they didn’t already know. They felt invincible. He would write stories and she would make paintings and their work would collaborate and one would feed the other when they were starving and heal them when they were sick. He didn’t know she was unhappy. She ended it on a rainy afternoon over the phone, saying she wasn’t in love anymore – that he was not the one and that she was sorry. He didn’t beg or plead at first. Then he did a whole lot of both until, one day, he found himself in a doctor’s office being prescribed placebos and anti-depressants and a regimen of daily activity to take his mind off things. After L went mad – lost her mind and was diagnosed – the suicidal thoughts were, truth be told, nothing serious – just garden-variety self-loathing and run-of-the-mill psychosis. The fact that he had made through his first year at college seemed a miracle to him. Then there were the Megan’s. Each in quick succession and each one’s name spelled differently. Megan #1 had just broken up with her boyfriend and seemed to like the writer. They spent a few awkward dates on a couch, not having much to say, and not really saying anything until they’d started making out. He felt bad for reading Hoftstadter to her as much as he did for fucking her. She ended things not long after they began – full of guilt and relief. The writer felt much the same. 7 Meghan #2 told him she wouldn’t have sex, and he said ok and good riddance to sex altogether – happy to oblige. But, one night, she had pressed the weight of her body into him and moaned, and he reached down and ran his fingers through the warm folds of her thin gym shorts. She sat up, ramrod straight, and glared at him. He apologized, said he didn’t mean to – that it wouldn’t happen again. He hadn’t understood. She started threatening that she would sleep on the floor if he was going to stay and left him in her dorm room in the dark as rain started to fall outside. He sat on the floor feeling like a fool for a nightmarish five minutes, cursing himself for not understanding where the line had been drawn, hoping she still liked him – that he hadn’t blown his chances to find a sliver of happiness. The door creaked open again and he asked her if he should go and she said no. She called him to bed and jerked him off before they fell asleep and did it twice again in the morning, telling him to wear her bug-eyed sunglasses so she could watch herself when he came. It lasted another week before she got bored and told him not to call anymore. The writer met Meaghan #3 just before he started grad school. Her parents had a swimming pool and she could get really excellent weed from a chubby guy named Max, and sometimes she and her brother and the writer would have bonfires behind her house and play guitar and kick a soccer ball around and drink beer until the humidity forced them inside and into their rooms.