Issue 29 February 2016 Flash Fiction Online February 2016

A sister’s heart is a cube, quartz clear, the size of a fist, suspended in the hollow interior of her porcelain chest.

When Sister Margo’s heart began to beat again, she was immediately afraid that the other sisters would hear it and somehow stop it.

It was the baker’s boy’s fault that it began to beat again. He’d laid his hand on the soft leather that upholstered her fingers and looked into the empty spaces where her eyes would have been.

“The flour is very fine quality this week,” he’d murmured, and there inside her chest the crystalline cube began to shudder.

“Thank you,” she’d said, the strings in her slender throat pulled taut, the bow at the back of her mouth caressing them. She had withdrawn her hand from the counter too slowly, and the boy had to know, must have known what he’d done to her.

Sister Margo, when she returned to the convent, left the bread for the novices in the kitchen and excused herself, and in the privacy of her cell packed cotton batting around her heart to deaden the sound of it. She was sixteen, something like sixteen, though she’d lost her birthday long ago. She knew that it was summer when she was born, remembered some early day with her mother, hot and sticky, sweet with pink flowers that grew in tufts on river trees. She’d had a birthday present, long forgotten, but its delicate wrapping lived in her still, framed by the branches and trees and warm peach haze.

It was summer now, too, so perhaps she was seventeen, and in the cool vaults far below her lay the bodies of her sisters, and her body among them, where it had lain since she surrendered it three years ago. There it would remain, unchanged, young and pale in the darkness, empty as a seashell abandoned by the tides.

She wondered, did its heart beat now as well, in sympathy with her sister’s heart? Would it echo through the vault, would it raise an alarm, would her sisters discover her, pluck this heart from her chest and replace it?

The bells tolled, and under cover of their sound she found her way to prayer and lifted her thin voice in song. The novices behind their veils with their still human voices, the mournful strings of her sisters, the clanging of the Mother Superior, all the sisters’ voices lifted up, and she knew, she remembered, how they sounded in the town, like the voices of strangers, otherworldly, inhuman. Within her chest, the heart beat still, and she felt it reverberate within her like the beating of wings.

* * *

Phillip. The baker’s boy was named Phillip.

Sister Margo could not devise a reason to give up her duty buying provisions for the novices who still ate. Could not, did not want to. Once a week she went, once a week the boy, who was the age of her body deep below, looked into her empty eyes, laid a hand upon hers, intimated some mundane secret: the currants were too dry this week, the rye was the freshest baked.

At night when the other sisters slept Sister Margo would throw open the shutters and let in the moonlight, open her chest and unpack her heart and check it all over for the cracks she was sure must form. In its regular beat she now heard, unmistakably, the call and response, Phil-lip, Phil-lip, like the cry of a night bird.

Her sisters knew only that Sister Margo sang more loudly than she once had, that the sound resonated differently behind the featureless porcelain of her face.

* * *

Sister Margo had not set foot inside the vault since the day her sisters had parted her from her first body. Stepping into the endless cool, dry night of the vault, she was greeted by the rows of her sisters, their faces and fingers and hearts long cut adrift from their souls. Would she recognize herself, she wondered, the body she’d abandoned? All of the faces looked the same, young women forever in the fullness of youth, lips parted in repose, hands clasped dutifully in prayer.

The leather of her feet shushed the darkness, the beating in her chest kept time, the flame of the rushlight in her hand caressed each face, each body until she saw her own prone self illuminated. Yes, she thought, as she studied the hands, the scar on the pad of her left index finger where she’d cut her embroidery thread too recklessly, the comforting roundness of her stomach, the soft slope of her shoulders. Why had she forsaken herself? Somewhere in the quartz clarity of her heart the tight feeling of tears began to form, though her empty sockets couldn’t weep.

She thought of the novices upstairs, thought of them crying and eating and singing off-key. She tried to remember the taste of bread, the sharp feeling of a wound, the dull ache of cramps. She had given them up, and willingly, how long ago? Suddenly she felt around her the pressure of unlived days, the time lost, in her body and the bodies of her sisters. She could live seventy identical years here, and all she would know is that the baker’s boy had lived and died, that the novices had become sisters, that new novices had come, that in the outside world the currants were sometimes dry, the rye was sometimes fresh.

Their bodies were horrifying, their bodies were timeless, were wretched, were blessed and macabre. She opened her chest and took out the cube that was a sister’s heart, set it on the stone slab beside her human self, raised her inhuman fists and shattered it.

The rushlight burned, burned, went out.

* * *

“Which bread is the freshest today?” The girl Margo asked the boy Phillip and laid her hand on his on the counter.

Their eyes met, and Phillip recognized the emptiness there, and smiled, and never told a soul.

My hands ache, ache, and when I look at them, I don’t remember them looking like this. Maybe it’s the skin, paper-dry and thin, like an old person’s. Do my hands look like this? I puddle cream in my palm and work it in, wringing my hands. Polishing them.

Scales. I should be doing scales, I think, and go for a cup of tea. The problem is, I don’t play the piano. And I don’t drink tea.

I have it, though. Tea is good for stomach ailments, and I never know when I might have a stomach ailment. I fill the kettle, which feels much heavier than it did this morning when I boiled water for coffee. My joints are swelling with arthritis. As I watch, the fingers lengthen. I ignore the adage and watch the pot, which promptly boils, an alarm going off. No time, it says. Quickly. Quickly.

It is ten o’clock, time for the news, and the first item is the death of Maestro Isaak Feld, the great concert pianist. They are retelling his accomplishments, showing black and white photographs from his career. I gulp scalding tea and barely hear. My fingers have become long, still curved somewhat from arthritis but oh, they are beautiful hands, capable, with square nails. I stretch, experimentally. The voice coming from the television says Maestro Feld had an octave and a half of reach. I don’t know anything about music, but it looks right, to me. Feels right. Quickly, quickly.

It doesn’t matter that it’s late, it doesn’t matter that I have belted my raincoat on over nightgown and slippers. Where I’m going the night will be full of women who look like me. I grab my purse and head for the bus stop. There will be no safe place to park.

When I get to the mission, someone tries to talk to me. I look down, shuffle my feet, shake my head, hands firmly in pockets, stay silent. The piano — where is it? I spot it in the corner. She tells me she’ll get me blankets, a pillow, food; that I should stay right there.

I can’t. I have no time. Or — just enough.

When she goes, I take the hands to the upright. It doesn’t take musical knowledge to know it hasn’t been tuned in my lifetime. I close my eyes and silently apologize for this excuse of an instrument. The hands deserve better. But they know what they need, and they take to the keys as if they’d never left them. Mozart, Debussy, Brahms, Beethoven.

I feel music running out of my hands like water. When it goes suddenly dry, I stand up to leave, but she comes back and catches me. “Who was doing that? Who was playing? It was so beautiful — who was it? Was it someone here?” I point mutely to the door and begin to move toward it in a shuffling walk.

“He’s gone?” I nod. “Wait — if you’re going to go too, don’t leave without these.” She shoves the bedding, wrapped sandwich, and juice into my arms. “And don’t forget — you don’t have to be out there alone.”

Her smile is kind, and I croak an answer. “Not alone. Never.”

She hugs me, ebullient. “That’s right. That’s right!”

I go out into the night exhausted and give the package from the shelter to a child. The bus doesn’t often run, down here, and the night is cold. Without thinking, I put a leg on the back of the bus bench, and stretch a luxurious ballet stretch; my hands, now my own, holding my suddenly knowledgeable foot. A passing local whistles, and I yank my leg down.

Not alone. Never.

I look down. My slippered feet are in first position.

I thought the tendriled horrors were angels when we woke at sea that disastrous night and saw them falling on the waters. Now, Suneeti, on this abandoned island, they are radiant in the setting sun, their translucence licked gold by dusk.

The first one crashed onto the deck of our little boat. Its body was round, jellyfish-translucent, with six wing-like fins, and fine waving tendrils like underwater kelp. An alien, ethereal beauty–of course you reached out and brushed a tendril with your fingers. You were always the curious one. I caught you before you collapsed on the deck, fast asleep. The horrors swarmed the hull, their soft feet sticking like little kisses climbing up a neck, but I took you below and locked the hatch. Tendrils groped through the cracks, but they couldn’t reach us through the door.

You slept so long and hard. Even the storm couldn’t wake you, nor could the shipwreck, the fear, the floundering. You are sleeping still, many weeks later, eyelids flickering in dreams I cannot share. After three years of long-distance calls across six time zones, after our long-awaited reunion voyage, still, you have gone to a foreign shore without me. I am twice bereft.

There are stories, Suneeti, where princes wake a woman with a kiss. Would it work, I wonder, for a princess too? But it matters not. Stolen kisses are for presumptuous men. I won’t kiss you until you can kiss me back.

After the wreck, I searched your papers, page after page of careful pencil sketches that took you away from me years ago. Notebooks crammed with radial starburst shapes–primitive cnidarians, hydrae and jellyfish and medusae in flowing tentacled skirts, their snapping purple beaks tucked beneath. But I did not find what stung you. Instead, I found your love letters in the margins, on the blank sheet backs, crammed between lines, your innermost heart crying out for me, though you never sent them.

I found the ring, too. I’m wearing it now. I would have said yes, you know. It is important you know that.

How long can I fight the monsters, the loneliness, the deprivation? How can I withstand their chill wings, their drifting tendrils? I am only one woman. I rise each day from beneath our overturned sloop and scour the island for water and food, enough for my survival. At night, huddled against your sleeping form for warmth, I write you letters in hopes you may someday read them.

Sometimes I dream a tendril brushes my cheek, and I awake screaming to this nightmare, my eyes buried in your long, dark hair. You smell salty like the ocean, like tears. Most nights, I don’t sleep at all, for fear their touch will send me into eternal torpor beside you. The horrors are everywhere, so many I cannot see the ocean anymore. They have displaced the waters with jellyfish ichor and fine tendrils. The waves roll like a cat stretching its back, all its hair on end. Even if I could fix the boat, how would I repel them the moment we set sail? They would swarm us again in an instant.

But you would be so proud of me. Today I have made a discovery: your letters, Suneeti. The horrors cannot touch your letters. I discovered it by accident last week when the wind ripped at one of your notebooks, and I  gathered the scattered papers strewn along the shoreline. One blew near the lapping nightmare waves. I was determined not to lose a single page, not when you wrote them, so I braved their tendrils, and then it happened: the ichorous bodies shrank from the paper’s touch.

Now I wear them as my armor, laminated in yellowing tape and wrapped around my breast. Letters on my back. Letters on my legs. Your signature an unbreakable charm over my heart, an incantation. They grope for gaps between these pages, but you, Suneeti, have confounded them at last.

And so, Suneeti, dearest Love, I shall carry out my last and most desperate plan, because I need you to hear my yes, and to kiss me back, and to hold me until the nightmares fade. I shall wrap you in the tattered blue kaftan that covers us both at night. I shall braid new ropes. I shall tear these pages from my notebooks, each and every one, and paper over the warped, wet wood of our wreck.

From these words, I shall build a new sloop to repel all monsters. Your letters will form the keel. Mine shall form the mast. This page shall be the sail. I will launch our bark on ghostly waters when Pisces ascends in a sky that is still ours, and no tendril will touch it. We will lie together in the hull, and I will hold you close until our love bears us across this nightmare sea, or until it makes the ink run.

This thing we call a heart that beats persistently in our chests is a sturdy yet infuriating and fragile thing. It functions without ceasing for decades despite neglect and, eventually, age. But a single word can tear it in two. It can deceive us and mislead us. It can cause us to soar into fits of helpless euphoria or sink into the deepest wells of depression.

Voltaire once said, “The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.”

Sometimes more than the mouth careens wildly out of control when matters of the heart require logical decisions.

But what would we do without it? The world would certainly be a cold and forbidding place.

For this, the month of St. Valentine’s Day, we bring you stories of the heart. Stories of broken hearts, of torn hearts, of crystalline hearts, and hearts lost up the proverbial magician’s sleeve.

First, from Raven Jakubowski, “Sister Margo’s Heart.”

Followed by “Love Letters on the Nightmare Sea,” by Rachael K. Jones.

Next up is “The Magician’s Assistant,” by Paul Crenshaw.

Finally a second-run offering: Shawn Proctor’s “Heartwood,” first published in Anthology Philly, a collection of short stories from Wragsink Press.

Happy Reading and Happy Valentine’s Day. May some kind person bring you chocolates!

The magician comes home, but his assistant has disappeared. He checks in his hat. He checks up both sleeves. He checks beneath the Table of Death and the Goldin box where he used to saw her in half and once, after too much wine, let her saw him because, she said, one of him wasn’t enough. He checks the Inexhaustible Bottle, the Sands of the Nile, the Zig Zag Girl.

In the bedroom, her things are all gone, but for the sequined dress she wore in his shadows and one high heel. When he does not find her under the bed or in the bathroom or behind the shower curtain, he goes out on the front stoop, where some nights he would find her, very late, smoking and watching the lights of the city wink off one by one.   

While he is standing on the front stoop looking for signs of her, a small boy notices him with his cape still on. Soon a crowd has gathered, expecting some trick. He wants to tell them there is no trick, that he has made a woman disappear and now cannot find her, but this gives him an idea, and so he begins to pull items from his sleeves. He pulls out letters he wrote to her from Sioux City, Iowa, and Carbondale, Illinois, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, in those days she didn’t make his shows, before she wore the sequined dress and stood by his side on the stage, smiling. He pulls out silk handkerchiefs with her scent still on them and is reminded of the moment after the show, in the delirium of applause, when he would kiss her behind the curtain so she would see she was more than two parts, more than a body to slide a sword through. He pulls out the high heel she lost in one of his shows, and he never returned. The eyeliner she didn’t wear at home. The pearls of a necklace he broke when hurling knives at her head. All the empty parts she wore on the outside as if these things will cause her to reappear. He keeps pulling one thing out after another—ticket stubs to concerts they saw, his and hers bath towels, a faded picture of the two of them together in the photo booth at a Chuck E. Cheese across the street from the hotel in Davenport–until he runs out of her, and when he realizes there is nothing left he takes the rose from his lapel and lets the petals fall and a child that could very well have been his daughter, in another universe or a different life, holds up her hands as if to catch them.

At this point in the show, on stage alone, he would call out for his lovely assistant to join him. She would step through the curtain, sequined and shining like the spotlights in his eyes. The cameras always caught them there, the magician holding out one hand to help her step down onto the stage.

Looking back toward the door of his empty house, hand outstretched as if waiting for her to appear, the magician remembers moments that might have meant something, like the announcements he makes before the next illusion.

It’s always about the magic, she had said in the snow outside Cincinnati, headlights of coming cars haloing her hair, and he had the feeling she did not mean sleight of hand nor sawing in half.

You cut me, she said the next night near Cleveland, applying lipstick like blood, but he thought she meant a mistake on stage.

For the unobserved, he thought, his tricks were magic. But for the initiated—especially assistants who stood in the shadows—the magic disappeared over time. It became not miracle but mundane. He stopped noticing the way she shimmied into her sequins before each show. The arch of an Achilles as she slid on her shoes. He focused on the deception of dismemberment and not the deep breaths she drew after he slid something that wasn’t a sword inside her. She became something expected, the magic he saw every day but no longer paid attention to. Like illusion, is love.

What the gathered see standing on his front stoop as he checks his sleeves is not what she saw before she slipped away, so what he needs now is a grand gesture to get her back, some mummery to renew the magic. But he does not know, standing there, what legerdemain can fool love. In this minute all his magic is mute. His devices devoid of her form, the Inexhaustible Bottle as empty as his insides in the moment he made her disappear.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the magician says, dropping the last rose in the realization she isn’t returning, “as you can see, I have nothing up my sleeves.”

When we boiled sap in the sugarhouse, I couldn’t breathe. I stood next to my father while heat billowed from the stainless steel evaporator, sap moving through the flues. It frothed with leaves and slowly became syrup. The maple smell, intoxicating and sweet, reminded me of Violet.

I shoved logs in the firebox, then pulled off my gloves. It was the morning of Valentine’s Day. Six months ago, I had planned to meet Violet on Route 7, to head far from Vermont.

My father cracked the joints in his neck. Scruff grew like moss on his sharp cheeks.

“Tend the fire?” I asked. He nodded.

I pushed out of the door and stood on the ice, rough with our boot prints. Buckets hung on the nearby maple trees.

“Teddy.”

At the sound of my name, I stopped.

“Don’t go too far.”

* * *

The prior autumn, I had left Vermont and went to college in West Chester, a town outside of Philadelphia. It was the furthest place from home I could imagine. A chance to strike out on my own. I paid for my textbooks with half the semester’s food money. I fell in love.

It was at a coffeehouse’s open mic, and she balanced a black Gibson acoustic on her thigh. Violet. Smile like the Cheshire Cat. Her name the color of her corduroy dress. Her silver ankh flashing like an electrical storm in the spotlight. Her soprano conjuring melody.

She went to order a drink, and I followed. “Great song,” I stammered. “I’m Teddy.”

Violet tilted her head toward me. “I was getting this coffee to go.” She paused. “Want to tag along?”

Everyone knows a couple like we became. All wrong together. If only to one another, we made perfect sense. I told her about my family’s maple farm, how when the sap is running you get two drops every heartbeat. She told me stories about her friends — a tumble of hippies and beatniks. Her parents had happily divorced ten years ago and settled in separate McMansions near New Hope.

“You should camp with us this summer at the folk festival.” Violet ran her fingers along my hand’s calluses. “Melt our worlds together.”

My dad and mom needed help preparing the farm for the long New England winter. There was always more work than time. Always. I sighed, inhaling her sweet fragrance, and my excuses fell away. “I promise.”

Together, we dreamed of that weekend., how it should have happened. We would trace the spine of the Green Mountains and follow tangles of unmarked back roads until the memory of Rutland faded and became weary, frost heaved turnpikes of New Jersey then Pennsylvania.

After the almost-syrup boiling in the evaporator had reached 220 degrees, my father and I filtered it through cheesecloth, then a sheep wool sieve—sugar sand and twigs clogging the material.

My father and I trudged down the snowy ridge to collect fresh sap. I stopped near one of the old trees on the farm. “The drill marks are still there,” I said.

He kneeled and ran his fingers over the gray bark. “Seven generations of tap holes. That’s why you only drill a couple inches deep,” he said. “Heartwood doesn’t heal.”

“He can hire someone.” Violet shook her head. It was the day before spring semester finals, but I couldn’t concentrate.

“Lousy winters make for lousy syrup,” I said once more. “They can’t afford it.”

The night my father had telephoned repeated in my memory. I had argued for three solid hours when he told me that I couldn’t return to college.

“Find work down here. Be with me.” She pushed her textbook away and took my hand. “But,” she said, “you’ve already decided to move back.” Her lip trembled.

I nodded.

“You’ll still come with us? This summer?”

I memorized the feeling of her fingers on mine, the heat of her touch. “Of course,” I said and held my breath until it burned in my chest and I had to let go.

Previously published in Anthology Philly (Wragsink Press), 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

OR, YOU ARE NEVER WHERE YOU THOUGHT YOU’D BE, LOSER!

NOTE: This is a companion piece to THE TYRANNY OF ONE. You don’t need to read it first, but you may want to afterwards.

My life and career are not what I’d planned. Once I got my act together as an adult, I believed the tried and true message that hard work, goal setting, and validation by institutions would provide me a life with some stability. The picture I’d had, of a married life where I worked at a university and wrote novels and academic or pop history books was utterly derailed by compounded tragedies that forced me to survive, re-evaluate, and recuperate in a rotten economic climate. Like younger historians, I’m not working full time in academia, despite best efforts (but when close to a thousand new grads pop out annually, without commensurate job openings, the competition isn’t just tough, it’s stupid).

By the standards of the life I’d pictured having by now, I’m a rank failure.

Wait, it gets better!

Because of this failstate, I’ve been forced to build a life that was outside my plan. What I’ve cobbled is a Frankensteinian combination of work, self-generated as well as within institutions, that deal with my rather bizarre skill set: professional military historian, professional writer of fiction and essays, professional improv actor, professional teacher.

In most writing books, failure is discussed in terms of rejection. I’m tired as fuck of these stories, and I say that having some of my fail stats as part of the curriculum at the Odyssey Writing Workshop (243 rejections to get 14 short story sales in one year). Failure is used to demonstrate the perseverance that leads to success. And that’s a good lesson.

But I don’t need to learn perseverance. I’ve endured shit that would drive some folks to the bottle or suicide and kept going. Box-checked.

What I want to know more about is what to do with failure when you’re still in its grips, how to think about it in terms of small pieces and massive collections, with regards to WHY ARE YOU HERE AND WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH YOUR FOUR-SCORE-AND-TEN AS IT DEPLETES VERY, VERY QUICKLY?

There’s a smaller voice in writing circles about rejections being part of the process of revision. That part is ringing truer to me these days. Because, as a stubborn son of a bitch, I endure well. I come from peasant stock with roots in occupied Eastern Europe and Dickensian poor houses. My family emblem is a bull. Endure? Try me.

But I have a harder time looking at failure and trying to make sense of it, and even worse, having people give input on why it failed so that maybe good will come of the fail. Why is harder?

There’s an old algorithm in my brain that says “Any mistake in your work is evidence of your complete failure as a human being. Loser! Loser! Loser! Better hide that fail or all your efforts will turn to piss.”

Now, that’s a massive jump in logic. There’s no truth in it. But that doesn’t dampen that voice. For as long as I can recall, when people give me good advice on my work that may be failing in some respect, it goes two ways:

1. I see what they’re saying, and it’s great insight that will make the work stronger. I thank them for it and then use their input to make something better.
2. That looped tape about me being a sack of turds born to fail starts up and I get quiet. Quick. It’s better at a distance in time and space. Up close and personal, I feel a self-hatred that churns like the Atlantic Ocean against the Eastern seaboard in winter.

Guess which one blooms 99% of the time?

So, imagine the tsunami of grief when I look at where I am and where I thought I’d be as a human being. I wish I could be zen about this and say: wherever you are is where you’re supposed to be. But I can’t. My old paradigm is crushing. I have to make sense and do things with failure.

I told myself that the catastrophe of my life in 2013 would be transformative. It has been so, and much good has risen with me, but it has also turned out to be far harder than I anticipated (though better from where I used to be by several orders of magnitude).

So, I’ve pieced some thoughts together on failure and its impact on career and self. The late Melanie Tem, a beautiful person and writer who was one of my early mentors, once noted that the only way she could process the grief of her son’s death was to remember: other parents had also survived and recovered from such tragedy (the novel she wrote of the experience, Black River, is almost too painful for words). While failing to reach career stability as a writer is inconsequential compared to grief over dead loved ones, the value of models of behavior to what I call failstates is instructive.

Again, I’m choosing comedians over writers of fiction. Why? First, because both cases here also show something I saw when writing THE TYRANNY OF ONE: in the arts, it’s not just endurance, but a willingness to grow and find new opportunity (rather than being only bull-headed) that allows for the mutation of a career into what it can be (which is ever changing, even if we hate change). Second, most writers don’t write about needing to change. Or failure beyond rejection.Just perseverance. And I think we’d do better if we thought about the value of self-reflection and fine tuning and finding our voice in the heart of failures. . . even if it takes us miles away from the ONE THING WE THOUGHT WE WERE MEANT TO DO.

* * *

Steve Martin’s career is inspiring for oddballs and strange ducks. He once noted that he was never great at any one thing, so he made an act that focused on many things he was good at: comedy, acting, juggling, magic, music, philosophy and absurdity. It wasn’t normal fair, but combined with his natural charisma, his act got him (and lost him) work as a performer on TV and a writer on The Smother’s Brothers. All the while he was refining, adjusting, and thinking about how his act operated. Through the late sixties he opened for bigger acts to small acclaim and boos. But then, the big time called! He was asked to perform on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

“There was a belief that one appearance on The Tonight Show made you a star,” Martin recalled in his memoir. “But here are the facts. The first time you do the show, nothing. The second time you do the show, nothing, the sixth time you do the show, someone might come up to you and say, ‘Hi, I think we met at Harry’s Christmas party.’ The tenth time you do the show, you could conceivably be remembered as being seen somewhere on television. The twelfth time you do the show, you might hear, ‘Oh, I know you. You’re that guy.” Tired of TV work, despite the pay check, he hit the road in the early 70s as a solo comedian. Here he learned to work the crowds in dives, occasionally open for bankroll talent, and refine his act. It was playing in these nowhere spaces that his act began to mutate. Largely by improvising.

When a set ended and there was no backstage at the club, he made “leaving” the show part of his set, ad libbing and improvising as he did so. And so the crowd followed him. Including to McDonalds, where he ordered three hundred hamburgers, saw how much they cost, and got a small fries. Absurdist moments of silliness were thrown at the crowd as well as the magic and jokes and songs and a new physicality that made him exhausted but sated after the set. Even using silence for mock contempt was added. He ditched dressing like his hippy audience and wore a suit. “The act was becoming simultaneously smart and stupid.”

Two years of this refined and improved set got him little to no press. No big pay day. Even with Tonight Show appearances, his name was “a rumor.” Ten years of learning by doing in theater, magic, TV writing and appearances . . . still eating road food. Four years on the road as the main task, Martin was emerging into his own and flopping at the Playboy Club before hitting North Carolina’s Hub Pub Club . . . in a mall.

In January 1975, Martin kept a diary. What he recounted during this long dark night of the soul felt eerily familiar to me, trying to find my place in art and life. The grind of show after show grew as he arrived in Winston-Salem.

“My material seems so old. The audience indulged me during the second show . . . My act might as well have been in a foreign language . . . my act has no ending . . . My new material is hopelessly poor. My act is simply not good enough-it’s not even bad.”

Desperate, he called a friend and vented his spleen. She helped him balance himself in the wake of the repetitive and draining hardships.

Instead of abandoning his work, Martin pushed the limits. He’d found his crowd, even if no one else had: younger, avant garde San Franciscans. His persona as a righteous star who played banjo and had no tech support . . . killed. He got bolder. And it gelled. “The disparate elements I’d begun with ten years before had become unified: my road experience had made me tough as steel, and I had total command of my material. But must important, I felt really, really funny.” His career bloomed afterwards, gaining traction with people that read Rolling Stone and were tuning into the new comedy show Saturday Night Life. Before you say anything about comic timing, remember the decade of busting his ass and highs and lows.

Most writing columns would focus on Martin’s perseverance, the endurance, the stick-with-it-ness. But equally important was that he kept thinking and trying new things, he produced newer material, lost others, and began to find his voice. He wasn’t doing the same thing, over and over until the audience got it. He kept trying new things, refining, reconsidering, rejecting, and injecting. And failure was there, every step, including that dark space two-months away from his “turning point” into steady success (fiscally and creatively). At that cusp, he thought he was doing junk. Which is where outside perspectives and letting your brain cool from the grind of failure count toward making your best work. A trick I have yet to master.

The value in perseverance isn’t just that you hit the same drum until someone hears your genius. It’s that you get better, and that requires failure being your friend to help you ask: is this my best? Martin had to change to become who he would be. He probably thought he’d “made it” ten years prior when he was writing for the Smother’s Brothers, or on Carson, or you name it. In some way, he had to fail to make the changes that would turn him into the comic that caught fire. And he did it by not being like the rest. He didn’t look like the comic he’d started out as a decade before. And his career afterwards is filled with new challenges (film, novels, plays, musicals,). No tyranny of one here.

In a similar fashion, consider comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. For twenty-five years, Maron’s charisma and talent warred with his self-loathing, acerbic behavior and drug addictions to fuel and ruin his career at every turn. And because he’d burnt so many bridges, when he got clean the world saw him as a washed out has-been no one wanted to work with. In his keynote lecture of the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal in 2011, he laid his heart on the line about how he never “made it” in the industry. He still resents never making it, and resents the success of contemporaries like Jon Stewart and Louis CK, and for putting 25 years into a career that, at one point, was so tarnished that he couldn’t get a job washing dishes. No one would work with him. Suicide seemed a positive career choice. He was living in a pure failstate.

In 2009, out of options in the regular comedy industry, he started a podcast. He interviewed OTHER people. For a man who loves attention, that was a hell of a swing. But he soon learned how to empathize and get people to open up, in part because he was as open about his narcissism, depression, and failures: despite successes, Maron was known as a talented failure. And by taking the focus off himself, he pulled a resurrection act that no one in comedy could have predicted: millions of downloads, dozens of “star” interviews, ranging from Will Ferrill to President Barack Obama. But twenty-five years of gigs, unsuccessful pilots, HBO shows, and, burning most bridges forced Maron to change. Failstate gave him no other option than to find something he’d never have considered before, a new version of himself as an artist.

Speaking to the young comedians, he noted “Some of you aren’t that great. Some of you may get better. Some of you are great . . . now. Some of you may get opportunities even when you stink. Some of you will get them and they will go nowhere and then you have to figure out how to buffer that disappointment and because of that get funnier or fade away. Some of you may be perfectly happy with mediocrity. Some of you will get nothing but heartbreak. Some of you will be heralded as geniuses and become huge. Of course, all of you think that one describes you . . . hence the delusion necessary to push on. Occasionally everything will sync up and you will find your place in this racket. There is a good chance it will be completely surprising and not anything like you expected.”

I try to remember that when crushed by the shadow of a dead paradigm. I know I haven’t “landed” my career yet. The terrifying thing is I might not. Hell, there may be no landing (but by Pluto’s pitchfork do I hate the phrase “it’s a process”). But if there is, it will be in a shape I could not expect, and may require me to refine and readjust what it means to be a writer, historian, improv actor, etc. and be open to something that might seem out of reach, out of touch, or otherwise odd, and keep risking a failstate, even with all the fine tuning.

But it was ever thus and so.

See, it got better!

Right?