Writer’s Block

by Troy D. Nooe

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Didn’t I mention my car? It was a 1972 Chevy Vega, tan with a black racing stripe down the middle. I say it was a car and, for all intents and purposes, it was. Unless one of those purposes had actual driving or transporting involved.

No, my car was more of the lawn ornament variety. At least it would have been had I actually had a lawn.

At present, my car was sitting in the parking lot of my former apartment building. The transmission had gone out on it about six months earlier and I hadn’t gotten around to having it repaired just yet. I had planned on getting the transmission fixed right after I had the starter replaced and the head valve gasket done.

I guess you could say it was a bit of a project car and I wasn’t particularly good at projects. I always found that it was much easier to put things off and let them take care of themselves. Not that they ever actually took care of themselves, but it certainly made my life easier not worrying about it.

The other thing with my car was this bright orange boot that was affixed around the left front tire rendering it unmovable. It was due to a little misunderstanding I was having with the city over a lapse in my auto insurance. The misunderstanding involved them wanting me to get it and me not understanding why it was any of their damn business.

Regardless, for everything that it lacked in functionality and mobility it more than made up for in bare comfort and shelter. I decided it would be home for the foreseeable future or until the city finally got around to towing it away.

I spent that night curled up in the backseat of my Chevy Vega, huddled over my notebook and trying to come up with the idea that would release my enormous talent and send it spilling out over the pages that would eventually become my second novel. Things were moving rather slower than I’d hoped. I got nothing accomplished before falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning.

The next day I awoke early, feeling renewed and charged. Well, early if you consider some time past one early and as renewed and charged as a homeless, out of work loner with writer’s block can feel after sleeping cramped up in the back of a Vega.

It was time for me to figure some things out. I mean, I’m not totally irresponsible. I knew I’d need money at some point. I decided a visit to the local unemployment office was in my future.

If you have never been to the unemployment office I highly recommend it. It’s unlike any other place on earth. I’m not even sure it still qualifies as earth.

Picture a large building with unmoving lines of people as far as you can see. Picture too, that these people are an odd mix of derelicts, dregs and broken souls that share a common desperation and neediness. You can smell it in the air when you walk in. A mix of body odor, anxiety and yesterday’s lunch.

The other thing that all these people share is the absolute certain knowledge that they are somehow better than every other person in the room and that their unique circumstances should automatically catapult them to the front of the line where a personal representative should be standing by to attend to their special needs. It doesn’t work like that.

Instead, you’re forced to wait it out with all the other losers, stuck behind a three-hundred pound man with a belching disorder and a woman hell bent on sharing, with the rest of us, every mundane and tedious detail of how she’d ended up to be at the unemployment office in the first place.

I, personally, didn’t give a rat’s ass how big a jerk the assistant manager at the Dollar Store was. I just wanted to do my time in line and get my money.

You would think that after all my experience with Jennifer I could tune anyone out, but there was something about this lady.

It was like my ears were magnets and her voice was metal. No matter how hard I tried to repel it from my mind it would come blasting back at me like someone beating me upside the head with a crow bar. I suddenly understood how some mild-mannered CPA in Nebraska could go walking into a Post Office or a McDonald’s and start blowing away strangers with a semi-automatic rifle. Luckily for the lady, I didn’t even own a semi-automatic rifle.

Needless to say, this was doing nothing for my writer’s block. I was hoping to work out some of the details of my story in my head while I waited in line, but the constant barrage that was her shrill voice left me unable to concentrate on anything but wanting her dead.

After almost three hours of this, I finally found myself at the front of the line and face to face with the bureaucratic case worker who would serve as my savior and deliver me from my destitution.

“Name?” he grunted at me.

I have seen people who don’t particularly like their jobs. Hell, I was one of them for most of my adult life, but this in no way prepared me for the lump of misery and wretchedness that sat perched up behind the small wooden desk in front of me. He was large and bald and sweating through the short-sleeved button-up that was wrapped tightly around his torso. His wire-framed glasses were crooked with smudged lenses and there were dabs of BBQ sauce on his chin that he’d not bothered to wipe away after lunch. At least, I hoped it was from as recently as lunch.

I gave him my name.

“Address?”

“I don’t actually have an address at the moment.”

The man glared back at me with disgust. I could see the loathing he had for me in his eyes and for a moment I thought he might be getting ready to reprimand me or call for security and have me hauled away for vagrancy.

“Last address,” he said instead.

After ten minutes of one-word questions I stood waiting while his pudgy fingers worked the keyboard of his computer. Part of me wondered if anything he was typing even had to do with me. It certainly seemed that he was typing much more than the simplistic answers I had been shooting back at him.

Maybe, like me, he was another frustrated writer who was just coming out of a case of writer’s block and while I went on about my problem he was busily working on a novel of his own, ignoring me completely. I could only guess that if this were indeed the case, the book he was working on would be some kind of hardcore pornographic story involving whips and chains and a character, not unlike himself, paying a woman to let him call her Mommy while she spanked him.

“And your last job...” He broke my train of thought. “Did you leave it voluntarily or were you let go?”

“I walked out. It was a crummy job.”

“That’s a problem. You see, unless you were fired or let go, you are not eligible for unemployment benefits.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” He didn’t even look like someone who was capable of kidding.

“Look, this is the unemployment office. I’m unemployed. It would seem to me that I fit the basic criteria.”

“But you quit your job,” he explained.

“Thereby rendering me unemployed. Hence the unemployment benefits.”

“But you quit your job.”

“Did I say that? My bad. I meant to say that I was fired or let go or whatever it is that will get you to write me a check.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can put it through, but I can tell you now that it’s going to be denied. Even if it weren’t, you’re looking at six weeks before you get your first check.”

“Six weeks? I need money now.”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “You can check back in six weeks to see if you were approved or not. That’s all I can do.” He leaned around his computer and looked back at the line behind me. “Next!”

That was it. No goodbye, good luck, hope you don’t starve to death in the streets. No nothing. I wasted an entire afternoon that I could have been working on my book and I had nothing to show for it. Zip.

It was too early to go back to the car and, honestly, I wasn’t looking forward to another long night folded up in the backseat of the Vega. I decided a little fresh air might do me good.

There was a park not far from my old apartment building and I went there and found an empty bench. It wasn’t much of a park. A little patch of green with a swing set sandwiched between a busy thoroughfare and shopping center.

I pulled out my notebook and set to try my hand at starting my novel once again. The gears in my brain were churning about and I could feel them begin to roll around in my head, hoping to grind out the idea that would be my greatest creation.

Who was I kidding? I had nothing. I had less than nothing.

After days of battling the dreaded writer’s block it was time to face the cold hard facts. I just didn’t have it. For as much as I tried, there was no semblance of an idea left inside me. I’d been forcing the issue, letting the rest of my life fall to the waste side, but in the end there was only one truth staring me back in the face.

I was no writer. I had been lying to myself all along. There was no spark or talent inside of me. There was nothing that needed to be released from my being. It had all been a joke and I was just too stupid to get the punch line. I was a failure and I had just as much chance of going up on the space shuttle as I had of ever writing anything decent.

Why torture myself any longer? It was time to put away this pipe dream and concentrate on putting the shambles that was my life back together. It was time to give it up and hang up my pen and spiral notebook for good.

Maybe I could get my old job back. Maybe I could find someone to put me up until I got back on my feet. Maybe if I crawled back to Jennifer and begged enough she would take me back.

“Excuse me, young fella.” A voice interrupted my despair.

I looked up to find an older man standing over me. His hair and beard were long and straggly and his clothes were torn and tattered. He was covered with the dirt and grime of living on the streets and there was a wild look in his eyes.

“Could you write me something down?”

I had no idea what he was talking about and I stared back in confusion.

He motioned to the notebook in my lap. “Could you write something down in your booklet there?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I answered, realizing what he wanted.

The old man smiled his dark crooked smile. “Dat-Dog,” he said.

“What?”

“Dat-Dog.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Just scribble it down for me,” he yelled, clearly upset that I wasn’t following him. He spelled it out for me and I wrote it on the top corner of a piece of paper before tearing it off and reaching out to hand him the scrap with the meaningless words.

The old man laughed and pulled his hands away. “You keep it. I don’t need it. I just wanted you to write it down for me.”

With that, he turned and wandered off, laughing and muttering to himself as he went.

As far as strange encounters go, I’d had my share over the years so I wasn’t all that freaked out over the crazy old man. I’d seen people do much crazier.

I started to toss the slip of paper aside when it caught my eye and I pulled it in closer for further examination. It made no sense. It wasn’t even real words.

Yet, there was something about it that held me there staring at them and reading them over and over in my mind. Of course. Dat-Dog.

Everything began to make perfect sense. It was like a puzzle that came to together in my mind. They were the words I had been searching for.

Like the code words on the outside of the free AOL trial membership disc that you find in your mailbox, they unlocked something inside of me. They released the small rodent that had been trapped in the center of my brain and trying to gnaw his way out. I felt a wave of freedom and energy flow over me and the entire world seemed to come to me. All of my self-doubts and fears vanished in the moment and I was overwhelmed with a sense of confidence and purpose. The ideas were flying through me like electricity and everything in the universe fell into its proper place.

Words were coming to me like the notes of a familiar song and I began to write with a fury that I’d never experienced before. My story was laid out in my mind and I knew it word for word. My hand could barely keep up with the thoughts that were pouring out of my brain and I couldn’t help but smile. Not only was I writing, I was writing something good and something real. Something I could be proud of.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the second novel that I had been pushing myself so hard to write. In fact, it was just an off the wall short story. It was like nothing I’d ever written before, but it did cure me of my writer’s block.

So, what was the story that came to me on that park bench that day after the old man gave me those two special words?

You should know. You’ve just read it.

I might have taken a few liberties with it. It wasn’t actually written on a park bench and there was no old man. The two words... I just made them up.

The truth is, I never lost my job or my place, and the Jennifer part was fiction too. Pretty much everything after the first couple of sentences was crap, but what are you going to do? It’s just a story.

I still get the writer’s block from time to time, but it usually doesn’t last long. When it’s happening, it does feel like I have that hole in my soul, but the chicken wire seems to be holding up fine.