How Am I Different? Chapter 1

Chapter 1

This show is too well

designed; too well to be held with

only me in mind - - Aimee Mann

How am I different?

This was the question Abe had been asking himself all day. He jiggled the key in the door of his apartment, because of course it never worked with a nice stick and turn like anyone else=s, while trying to balance a single bag of groceries in one arm and a sheaf of old papers he did not have a reason for saving in the first place in the other. He eventually got around to actually stepping inside the doorway before everything went to shit on him and crashed around his feet. He grunted and was thankful that at least he had not bought eggs or tomatoes or some other food bomb that time around. There were no messages on his machine so he went straight to stacking his abused groceries in overtaxed kitchen cupboards.

Abe lived alone in an apartment outside one of the busiest pieces of Chicago and as of the next morning he would be turning thirty years old. It was an age that at even twenty-three had seemed impossible, as he remembered it; yet tomorrow he would be it. It would be he. Thirty. And so the question- How was he different? He knew that a lot of people had crises at thirty. It had always seemed to him, however, that those people were the ones who had nothing to be shocked over. They were soccer moms and math teachers who found it utterly unimaginable that they were suddenly >old.= What a load of shit.

Abe did not feel old. But here he was with that crowd of thirty-somethings. The fact that he didn’t feel like he was supposed to be was unsettling. He had no wife, no kids, and no mortgage. Those facts alone should have either scared the hell out of or consoled him but they did neither. So how was he different?

He was a writer. When he told people that they always thought he was either a poet or a journalist so he usually didn’t say anything. The fact was that he had earned a Master=s in English Literature by the age of twenty-four because it had been easy. He had written his first published novel by twenty-five because it had been easy. In his opinion, anyone who sat down to do it could write a book. It wasn’t as though it were surgery or anything.

The three books he had turned out were not anything spectacular. There were no awards on his mantle, no coast to coast tours. If you were to browse any decent public library you could find one or two of his works on a shelf but the truth was that there were a lot of books in most libraries. No one had ever heard of Abe Carrington. There were Kings and Grishams and Rices but he was not among them. He enjoyed writing; immensely in fact, it was just that the things he wrote about were not movement-inspiring to say the least. Truth be told, he had had no idea you could make a living writing about everyday people doing everyday things until he had read people like Nick Hornby and Jill McCormick, which were two other names you won=t hear in many circles, even though many people had seen Nick=s books made out as movies.

He got letters from people and had even had a date or two because someone recognized him from a jacket cover but that was the extent of his fans as far as he knew. Most people thought that if someone wrote books they were automatically as famous as the likes of Louis L=Amour or Dean Koontz. Abe=s biggest claim to fame was that his second novel had been a >Book of The Month= once. There was indeed a middle class of writers; a class that filled up the shelf space between those more notorious authors. The middle class books were ones that may catch you with a title by triggering a memory or sounding odd enough to pull off the shelf and take a glance at. They were the books with flashy, trendy looking covers and chic artwork that could grab a certain audience=s eye long enough to get them to read the back cover. Other than that... and Abe was perfectly happy with it all. He got advances and royalties from his works that kept him quite comfortable. So here the story could end, he thought, except that... There was the question.

In actuality he did little of anything with any substance. Ever since high school, when he started writing in the first place, he had never been able to do so until after dark. There was just something about writing in the middle of the day when he should have been doing something else that got to him in those days except later writing was precisely what he was supposed to be doing. There were no other tasks or precedence but he still couldn’t=t sit down at the laptop until nightfall and it left him with a lot of days to fill.

He tried as best he could. He bought groceries. He bought albums and clothes. He tried every silly thing from yoga to ceramics. Nothing. His flurry of activity from ten in the evening until three in the morning during the summer months was the most he accomplished. During the winter months he could write forty pages without losing sleep. He believed that was where the question came from. He had as much money as anyone else, more than some actually, and a real job he filled out on his taxes. But the nagging feeling of writing being a frivolous hobby made it seem as though he did nothing all day long. There was work sometimes because meeting with publishers and editors and publicists and such was a chore but it still was not the kind of strain he assumed road workers or waitresses went through. They were merely little annoyances that allowed him to live the rest of his life in peace, which is what he imagined a visit with in-laws must have been like.

As though he needed to be reminded of that. His longest relationship ever had been four months. How pathetic was that? Sometimes he dumped her, sometimes she dumped him but the end result was always the same, if it even got that far, which it seldom did. Usually it was a chance meeting, one or two real dates, a couple of >get togethers= or some such nonsense, and that was it. Mostly that was the way he preferred things; at least it was a way he was comfortable and familiar with. But tomorrow was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be a productive member of society; as miserable as everyone else. ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’, the saying went. He knew the life-changing epoch would not happen yet though because he would be there in less than six hours and anyways he had to write.

Abe sat at his desk which was in the same room as his couch and entertainment center and immediately knew nothing was going to happen that night. Probably not the following, either. His conscience was going to have fun with not doing anything for two days in a row but he lied to himself and said he would make it up later in the week; not that there was any point in it. He was intelligent enough not to disillusion himself. Or perhaps maybe he wasn=t intelligent enough to just let himself believe it.

Either way he headed down the block to the bookstore. It was only eight o=clock, too early to go to the pub even if he had wanted to, so he poked aimlessly among shelves of hard covers. (it was the only way he bought books- he was a writer and it gave body to the idea that if he was going to have a library it was going to be respectable looking) He rarely bought anything with prices the way they were but the people there knew him as one of the names on their shelves and gave him an over-emphasized courtesy. Sometimes he had signed autographs in the aisles for excited patrons, though he sensed the excitement was less because of him than the fact that they would have a book in their collection that was signed by its author. Still...

He was different for that, he supposed. Not many people were asked for their autographs unless it was a poor attempt at a joke from a banker or a delivery person. Was that a positive difference? Was that what he had been going for? It brought to light a whole new set of questions which carried dangerous moral undertones he was not willing to deal with in the bookstore.

Abe decided it was close enough to a respectable time to go to the pub so he left the florescent lights and the commercially carpeted aisles without making a purchase and in a countable number of steps was in the smoky, dim light of a less thought-provoking establishment. He thought the place remarkably uncrowded until he remembered it was a Tuesday night. Abe also remembered that the reason he found the scene so odd was that he was usually locked behind his keyboard any average night of the week.

That night, however, was not average. It was the kind of night he should be ordering rounds of shots and lamenting the youth he would be losing in a matter of hours. One of the disadvantages, however, of working a schedule opposite of most other people was that he had lost touch with many of his onetime friends. Even if he were to dig out their numbers from some address book he didn’t have they probably would not be too keen on spending the night at a bar if they had to get up for work the next morning. Abe sighed and ordered a lone shot to go with his pint and called it quits after both were emptied.