Gargoyle 12/13
cover photo by Marty Mintzell
publication date 7/27/1979

What About Us Grils?

Richard Grayson

You can skip this first section if you like. I am merely beginning somewhere, "writing myself into a story." I don’t know what this is going to be about yet. This is fiction without a net.

Here I am in print, skating the thin ice of ridicule. Confronted with another challenge of white space, I wonder if Yuri Gagarin felt like this in 1961, when he became the first man to orbit the earth. Our Hebrew school teacher told us not to be upset because Gagarin was a Russian: going into space, he said, was a great accomplishment for all mankind and would ultimately solve all our problems. Our Hebrew school teacher said that one of us would be teaching Hebrew school on the moon one day. As far as I know, nobody’s done it yet.

Or maybe I should tell you something helpful, something that will help you live in this, Yuri Gagarin’s, universe. (Do you remember that he died in a plane crash? Have you forgotten Yuri Gagarin already?) Here goes: in the summer, put a bunch of grapes in the freezer and serve them to kids; they’re more nutritious than sugar ices, and they taste so good you’ll want them for yourself. See? Does Joyce Carol Oates tell you things like that in her stories?

A week ago last Tuesday, when I was denied unemployment insurance by the New York State Department of Labor and when I was told there would be no courses for me to teach this summer and when my mother told me I’d better do something to make money and when I threw a bottle of milk at her, screaming that I would rather die than work in a Burger King and what other job could I get, I held the contents of an entire bottle of Tuinals in my hand for three minutes.

An hour and a half after that I was in the Kings Plaza Shopping Center, three blocks from my house, ordering a cheeseburger with sautéed onions and an iced tea at Bun ‘n’ Burger. When the waitress gave me the sugar for the iced tea I refused it, telling her, "That stuff’s bad for you."

The indomitable human spirit.

Last night at my girlfriend’s house we were sitting on her bedroom floor taking apart the Sunday New York Times. Julie wants to work on a small-town paper some day. I tell her that newspapers are dying all over the country, that the Times has gone to cold type, laying off hundreds of linotypers, that in most cities there is a newspaper monopoly, that eventually people will subscribe to a newspaper service that comes over the cathode-ray tube of their home computer terminal, and besides, reporters don’t make much money.

Julie countered or didn’t counter by reading an "Author’s Query" from the Book Review section. Somebody, it seems, wants to do an autobiography of William Ernest Henley.

"I bet you any amount of money it’ll be called His Unconquerable Soul," I told Julie.

She just smiled. She would make a beautiful reporter for a small-town newspaper. Julie’s image is now competent but with panache. She projects it beautifully.

In ninth grade we had to memorize "Invictus" and recite it before Mrs. Sanjour’s English class. She told me I was too melodramatic. We also had to recite a soliloquy from Julius Caesar that year: I chose one of Brutus’, when he was debating whether or not to join the conspiracy. I got a 98 on that recitation. They don’t recite things anymore in school; that all went out with the 1960’s a decade I vaguely remember. Of course in 1965, when Julie and I were in Mrs. Sanjour’s English class in Meyer Levin Junior High School 285 in Brooklyn, we didn’t know we were in the 1960’s, if you know what I mean. Julie and I keep saying we got the last good education in the public schools of New York.

Meyer Levin Junior High was not named after the novelist but the World War II hero, an airplane fighter pilot who had lived in the neighborhood. Meyer Levin’s mother used to come to every graduation; she didn’t look as though the school compensated her for the loss of her son. When I was little, I used to think the school was called "My Eleven." It was an excellent school, especially if you were in the SP program as Julie and I were. In Mrs. Sanjour’s class we also read The Odyssey and had to write our own epic; we read Poe and Swinburne and Edward Arlington Robinson; we wrote short stories (Mrs. Sanjour ridiculed mine in front of the class: "Richard’s ‘The Bus Ride’–oh, that was a thrill a minute") and learned to read every section of the Sunday Times. We were quizzed on it Mondays.

Today Mrs. Sanjour teaches remedial reading. The school is mostly bilingual and 90% of the students are Haitians or Puerto Ricans. Mrs. Sanjour tells me her students are mostly comatose; and she likes them that way–it’s better than violence. Mrs. Sanjour’s teaching days are over, she says; now she baby-sits. She says she can’t remember the short story that I wrote that she made fun of, but I do, vaguely: it had to do with a prejudiced woman talking against blacks on a bus. In the story I made it obvious that the woman was evil and banal.

That was a long time ago. I think–or would like to think–that my stories have been getting better. They’re less obvious, though.

For example, is this story about anything? Is it a story at all?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Maybe after I finish writing it and then I read it, maybe then I’ll know.

I’d better work the title in sooner or later, so here goes.

Remember graffiti in the 1960’s and the one that said MY MOTHER MADE ME A HOMOSEXUAL and the response under it, IF I GET HER THE WOOL, WILL SHE MAKE ME ONE, TOO?

When I was fifteen I wrote a play called, "If I Get Her the Wool, Will She Make Me One, Too?" You figure it out.

And Julie liked the graffito that said BROOKLYN BOYS LIKE GRILS. Naturally someone crossed out the word GRILS and substituted GIRLS. And just as naturally someone (me, I think) wrote underneath that BUT WHAT ABOUT US GRILS?

Have you figured it out yet? Three seconds I give you.

Good. I’m glad you got it.

Another friend and former classmate at P.S. 203, Meyer Levin Junior High, Midwood High and Brooklyn College is Harriet. That’s where Julie and I were last night, at Harriet’s apartment in Greenwich Village.

Harriet is an editor at a women’s magazine and was telling Julie and me about a story she had read. The story was submitted to her magazine and it was by Joyce Carol Oates and the manuscript looked like Joyce Carol Oates’ agent had sent it everywhere. It was controversial because it was 59 pages long and kind of strong for Harriet’s magazine. Harriet’s managing editor knowing how much Harriet hates fiction (except mine, and that’s only out of friendship) asked Harriet to make the final decision on the story. Surprisingly, Harriet loved it. But the managing editor decided not to use it anyway.

The moral of this story is that even good stories by Joyce Carol Oates get rejected for one reason or another.