Boys Dancing with Men: Fiction James Paul Austin Iowa State University
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Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2002 Boys dancing with men: fiction James Paul Austin Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Austin, James Paul, "Boys dancing with men: fiction" (2002). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 16240. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/16240 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Boys dancing with men: Fiction by James Paul Austin A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Creative Writing) Program of Study Committee: Debra Marquart (Major Professor) Constance Post Donald Hackmann Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2002 Copyright © James Paul Austin, 2002. All rights reserved. 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of James Paul Austin has met the thesis requirements ofIowa State University Committee Member Committee Member Major Professor For the Major Program 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV PROLOGUE V LITTLE MISTER UTAH 1 YES, REALLY, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE 16 After All 16 Before 18 Join the Party 36 Getting What You Want 88 This World Is Big 104 Ever After 112 BEING NEIGHBORLY 114 THE BEST MAN 132 HOW TO TELL A TRUE F AMILY STORY 150 THE TRAIN WATCHER 164 IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have the most sincere gratitude toward those who have had a significant role in my continuing development as a story writer. I have not reached this point, such as it is, alone. Surely the instruction, influence and goodwill of some important individuals will reach far into my future. I thank the following mentors for their professional and personal presence over the past several years: Carol Sparks, Maureen Fry, Kent Dixon, Timothy Wilkerson, M. Evelina Galang and Debra Marquart. I shall travel onward from this point with fond remembrance of your teachings, and with anticipation of our next meeting as friends and colleagues. I would also like to thank Constance Post and Donald Hackmann for serving on my thesis committee. No acknowledgement would be complete without mention of James Marvin Austin and Diana Kaye Austin, to whom I owe my existence on this planet. In your own ways, both of you have encouraged my interests from the youngest age, and I thank you for it. Your brave pursuit of better lives, for yourselves and for your children, is a fundamental reason why I find myself here at this place. May my determination match yours. I love you. v PROLOGUE Not long ago, I was returning from a conference in New Orleans with a group of other graduate students. It had been a long drive that day. We entered southern Iowa near dusk, and as our van moved away from the Mississippi River it had been hugging throughout our trip northward, the land cleared away. The trees and other greenery gave way to long, clean stretches of farmland. It was still late winter, but there was no snow covering the earth, which lay there brown and plain and reaching out to the sky. I was sitting in the back of the van, and as we shot through the end of another day, I watched the sun die beneath the horizon. The sky lit up in purples and pinks and oranges of all kinds, but the earth grew darker. As the sunset became more spectacular, the earth receded further away until it looked like night waiting for the day to finish its last dance. People around me were talking, listening to music, sleeping. But I could not stop watching this sunset because at that moment I had no idea how I had arrived in this place, with Iowa slipping past beneath me and the day losing its color against my retinas. Before long, the day would close and I would be left with only the dark earth. The day had passed before my eyes, much too quickly, and I wasn't sure exactly how I had arrived at the end of this day, and how I had ended this day unzipping Iowa on the road. I can't plead total ignorance, of course. I did understand a great deal about how I had arrived in that place at that time. I knew something of my choices-my good ones and bad ones-that had conspired together to make my life as it existed at that moment. I knew why I arrived in Iowa instead of Oregon or Ohio or Indiana. But it was the sort of moment I have every so often, when I shake the crud from my eyes and yawn and look around me as if everything is new, and I've just woken into it. It is a Vl moment of passage, of old lives I've lived, ofliving people I will never see again. A moment when I wonder over the tiny choices that spin our lives off to different places and fates. A moment to think of how our choices knick away possibilities and send us here instead of everywhere else. We can only be in one place at a time. And what sends us to the places we occupy with simple singularity? How did I end up in Iowa when all my family lives in Ohio? Where is my ex-fiancee right now? Who is this man she has married? What of the loss of friends and estrangement from family I have endured over the past two years? And for that matter, what of my year as a waiter in a tavern, the way my life drained away into the glib culture of food service, into beers and liquor and drunk driving and a woman whose abysmal mysteries I barely glimpsed at? What of these choices? Where have they taken me? This is not simply a matter of exploring chance. When I sit in the back of the van and watch another day end, I am also thinking about those choices-the daily, incidental types-that take us where we ultimately go. Like my mother, who watched her father die and told me afterwards that she wondered what it was like for him, the end of that last breath, alive for just a moment longer, the heart finally all still-like her, I wonder about people who pass from one type of life to another. I'm interested in what constitutes this passage. Does it always need to be our graduation or wedding days, or the night our mother or father died suddenly of a heart attack? I think not. More likely, our lives are strung together by the incidentals of daily life, not those relatively few memories emblazoned into our psyche. Certainly most days in my VB America pass by in smooth, comfortable patterns. What changes our patterns into new patterns could likely be as incidental as a walk to the post office, a port instead of an ale, sitting at the bar instead of sitting alone in a booth. These are choices, not chance. Every so often, these small choices take us somewhere different. Their impact is disproportionately large. That's what you'll find in my stories, I hope. Each of my main characters are, quite by coincidence, either boys or men, in all their various incarnations. And each are coming up against places in their lives where, to put it passively, choices are made. By the end of the story they exist within, the primary characters cannot go back to the place where the story began. These characters are changed people, even if they will not discover this difference until the story has finished, like the sunset that squeezes its million colors into only a few spastic moments, fighting the turn of the earth. That is to say, the sunset may not have known exactly what it was saying or doing. I'm sure it had no care at all about a transplanted Ohioan staring into its belly and listening, listening to its catcalls. But it left me with a sense of something beyond itself; when the cold dirt had reclaimed the landscape, I was still thinking of the dying and not the death. And I am still thinking about those few moments in southern Iowa. And I hope that these stories leave my readers with a sense of the same kind, that thing which reaches beyond the last word of a story's life, to what may be that new, changed place for the character they have followed for a time. The places may not be good places, or uplifting, or better-but such is the way with lives, sometimes. After all, for all the beauty of the falling sun and the dying day, what I remember feeling is loss. I didn't want anything back, but I missed the places I had been and people I had known, and all the events I had grown estranged from, and how the days are Vlll always ending and never beginning again, and I cannot go back to see old haunts and the people who once lived there. 1 LITTLE MISTER UTAH My mother sometimes like to tell me why she's famous. Usually it's late on some weekend night, or after drinks at The Lasso after work, when she comes home fumbling with her keys, pressing her weight against the plastic door of our trailer, literally falling into our little home, all warm in the winter, and I'll hand her the hot cup of tea I've had steeping for an hour, keeping it warm with occasional shots from the microwave, until it's dark green and thick.