CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The University of Utah: J. Willard Marriott Digital Library TRANSCENDENT WASTE by Robert Dale Glick A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah August 2012 Copyright © Robert Dale Glick 2012 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Robert Dale Glick has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Lance Olsen , Chair 4/19/2012 Date Approved Melanie Rae Thon , Member 4/19/2012 Date Approved Scott Black , Member 4/19/2012 Date Approved Kathryn Bond Stockton , Member 4/19/2012 Date Approved Lisa Henry Benham , Member 4/19/2012 Date Approved and by Vince Pecora , Chair of the Department of English and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Transcendent Waste is a collection of stories that explores the difficulties of bereavement through what we literally and metaphorically throw away. Characters in Transcendent Waste question the validity of ritual in healing, displace guilt and grief onto relationship and career, and attempt to empathize with others who understand death and mourning in radically different ways. Influenced by Bataillean notions of excess and Kristeva’s concept of the abject, I explore loss by using the concept of “waste” within literal, symbolic, and conceptual frameworks. Waste can signify trash, a surfeit of language, the lost potential of a life, the misuse of time, or the degradation of the body. In “Hotel Grand Abyss,” for example, a professor of popular culture/zombie studies reluctantly decides to consign his dementia- riddled father to a convalescent home. Waste need not be negative: in “Strawbellies,” for example, waste refers to once-useful survival strategies that must be sloughed off so that a family can recover from the loss of a son. Similarly, in “Mermaid Anatomy,” the narrator employs unpunctuated digressions, fractured timelines, and improper syntax; a “wasteful” and energetic language that, by fetishizing the unfamiliar, staves off his depression. Formally, the stories in “Transcendent Waste” are characterized by disruptions to subject position, language, and linearity. In “Southwest of Guadalajara,” a dramatic monologue by the Nazi architect Albert Speer is interrupted by either the collective voice of his victims or the voice of his own guilt. The story “In The Room / Memory is / White” depicts the relationship of a self-punishing child to his separated parents through multiple points of view and a narrative sequence that moves from the chronological middle towards the first and last scenes. Ideally, the use of unconventional narrative strategies in character-based, pathos-driven plots complicates our understanding both of storytelling and of loss. iv For L- “...one has a tendency to see the world as a vast junkyard, looking at a man and seeing only his (potentially) mangled parts, entering a house only to trace the path of the inevitable fire. Therefore when I was installed here, although I knew an error had been made, I countenanced it, I was shrewd; I was aware that there might well be some kind of advantage to be gained from what seemed a disaster. “ Donald Barthelme, "Me and Miss Mandible" TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…..……………………………………………………..........viii GOAT PHARMACY……………………………………………………………………...1 SECOND CITY…………………………………………………………………….........28 GLUE FACTORY………………………………………………………………….........30 SOUTHWEST OF GUADALAJARA…………………………………………………..49 STRAWBELLIES…………………………………………………………......................57 MERMAID ANATOMY……………………………………………………………...…81 K/S…………………………………………………………………………………...…100 RELEASE………………………………………………………………………………102 HOTEL GRAND ABYSS………………………………………………………….......112 STOMACHS OF THE HOMELESS…………………………………………………...126 IN THE ROOM / MEMORY IS / WHITE…..…………………………………………129 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Lance Olsen, Melanie Rae Thon, Scott Black, Kathryn Stockton, and Lisa Henry Benham for supporting and pushing me through the writing of these stories. These stories first appeared in the following journals: • “Goat Pharmacy” first appeared in New Orleans Review (Honorable Mention, 2011 Walker Percy Fiction Contest) • “Second City” first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review • “Glue Factory” first appeared in Fourteen Hills • “Southwest of Guadalajara” first appeared in Denver Quarterly • “Strawbellies” first appeared in The Tusculum Review • “Mermaid Anatomy” first appeared in the Notre Dame Review • “K/S” and “Stomachs of the Homeless” first appeared in Black Warrior Review • “Release” first appeared in Passages North • “Hotel Grand Abyss” first appeared in Copper Nickel (Winner, 2010 Copper Nickel Fiction Contest) • “In the Room / Memory is / White” first appeared in The Normal School (Winner, 2010 The Normal School Normal Prize for fiction) GOAT PHARMACY I passed my driving test, and Monkeyfur scored me this job at Gaynor Pharmacy. We worked on alternate days, after wrestling practice, bloated on Gatorade. Monkeyfur, who took fourth at the state championships last year, had Tuesdays and Thursdays. I agreed to do the Wednesday and Saturday shifts, allowing Monkeyfur to attend an optional weekend practice. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. I, wrestling at 160, didn’t have the talent to make varsity. Coach said I had to improve my reversals. He had full-body alopecia. If we didn’t want to run extra tapeline sprints, we didn’t ask to borrow his hairbrush. Because Monkeyfur kept falling behind on his deliveries (due to having sex in his treehouse with Ginny), Goat had placed both of us on probation. So when I came in on Wednesday, I immediately made sure the back office was clean. Any tiny potatoes mess- up, like an unplunged toilet or a stale peppermint patty, gave Goat a legitimate reason to fire us. To his credit, Monkeyfur had picked up all the packing peanuts, and had even scrawled a note for me: GBS 8.2. Meaning Goat, nastily hung over, might make me mop out the dumpster – he claimed that wet cardboard cultivated fast-developing, drug- resistant toxic molds. Or, applying his flaccid energies to a week’s worth of unsold Jumble Words, he might give me little more than a grunt and a nod. 2 I turned on the transistor radio. Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” was on KROQ. What did that mean, to have someone spin you round like a record? Tearing receipts and prescription instructions off a dot-matrix printer, I found that, luckily, I had only two deliveries: Mrs. Bialetti, and the San Gabriel Valley Elder Care Center, what me and Monkeyfur called the Corpse Preparation Zone . With my calligraphic pen (in Japan, you wrote your résumé in calligraphy), I meticulously copied the delivery destinations onto white paper bags, set the amber-colored bottles into the bags, and dropped the bags into a basket I had, on a dare from Monkeyfur, stolen from Gemco. Goat stood at the counter. Before I tried to pass him, I offered a small prayer to the kami that granted ninja invisibility. The prayer was unsuccessful. “Ari,” he said to me, using Monkeyfur’s real name, “didn’t sweep the front yesterday. He knows to sweep.” As always (when Goat was sober), his long silver hair was combed neatly back from his widow’s peak. He wore a brown pharmacy smock; his name, Jim Gaynor, stitched in thread over the pocket. The smock barely circled his gut. He must have weighed 280 pounds - I often imagined him stepping onto the four-pound postage scale and the dial going around 70 times. I guessed him into his late sixties; nevertheless he seemed older, ancient and barely bipedal, with this giant capillaried nose, like the Amazon River Delta seen from an airplane. “I’ll sweep later,” I told him politely. 3 “Donny!” he said, charading the motion of brushing dirt into a pan. “You’ll sweep right now.” He looked slightly sad. Ever since we agreed on the school’s right to conduct random locker searches, he seemed hesitant to chastise me. He gave me a ten-cent raise. My maturity, he claimed, let me provide superior customer service to the aged. I used the broom to whack dust off the front mat, gave the front sidewalk a cursory sweep, and came back in. Michele, the cashier, stopped dusting off bottles of nail polish and hobbled over to me on crutches. Someone had body-slammed her at a thrash show last week and green-sticked her fibula against a fire extinguisher. She wasn’t pretty; teased black hair, zitty, too much turquoise eye shadow. Today she wore blue jeans with spider web embroidery and a bootlegged Mötley Crüe Theatre of Pain tour jersey. “You wannabe new-ro,” she sighed, “slow down on the Sun-in.” My hair, sculpted down into a sharp point between my eyes, glinted an unnatural shade of reddish- blond. “What’s that scribbling on your skin there?” she added. “Birthmark.” “It looks remarkably like ink.” “Can I go now?” I asked Goat. “Take a candy bar,” he said with grandfatherly kindness. Michele rolled her eyes. I grabbed a Butterfinger. Me and Monkeyfur went on deliveries with the Goat Pharmacy truck because Goat was too Scrooge to insure my Toyota or Monkeyfur’s convertible black Rabbit. It was Monkeyfur’s second Rabbit; he had totaled the first one. After he won our league last 4 year, pinning this dude from San Dimas with a phenomenally fast cradle, his father bought him another, plus subwoofers and tinted windows. On the way out of the parking lot, the undercarriage of the truck scraped the ground. The rear view mirror showed Goat skulking down the alley to the bar. I put on my right turn signal, as if going to the CPZ. I didn’t turn right, though. Instead, I turned left, to Ginny’s new house. I couldn’t believe she had invited me over.