Read Online Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice - Free Book Online Page A

ludicrous accusation. All she has as proof that I refused to acknowledge Mom’s death is just one small incident in which I asked Aunt Paige to pose as my mother for a few years whenever friends came around. But I was a teenager then. And besides, Mom’s death is not the issue here.
    I’m getting off track. I need to stay focused. I thought the Ritalin would help, but I think I made a mistake in crushing it up and snorting it. The guy who sold it to me—a former student of mine whose name I should probably keep out of this, seeing as how it’s a legal document of sorts—said it was time-release, which I frankly did not have the patience for, and I thought sending it up my nose would make it work faster—you know, giving it a more direct path. But now I’m not sure it’s working faster. It’s always hard to tell. Either way, I’m now experiencing what is called the drip, when the snorted substance works its way through your sinuses and can be tasted in the back of your throat, something I haven’t felt in many years. Even though it makes you feel mucusy, it’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation, if only for the sense-memory it evokes. It’s my own personal madeleine.
    Since we cannot understate Oliver’s culpability in the defamation of my father, what I have to say here will certainly be important background info. You surely know Oliver Kelly as the guy who sold you Edie’s book, but the folks in the literary wing down the hall from youprobably have had more experience with him, as he is the guy who dutifully submitted my novels Season of All Natures and Rarer Monsters to publishers, tried valiantly to sell them in a world that is no longer receptive to literature, an upside-down world that thinks “nonfiction” denotes truth and “fiction” untruth, despite the fact that my sister’s book of lies will be shelved as nonfiction while my fiction walked the razor’s edge of existence and shone the hard light of truth on the world.
    I first met Oliver when I arrived in Iowa in 1974, having fled L.A., the place where everyone knew my résumé, now ready to remake myself as a bona fide man of letters. It was my first time in the Midwest and as I drove along I-80, my car packed with my every belonging, I found the resolute flatness existentially daunting, the silos phallic in a strangely druidic way, the general corn-centric culture (the maize-mazes advertised on the side of the interstate, the corn-on-the-cob-shaped flashlights displayed for impulse buys at gas stations) quasi-religious, but when I got to Iowa City, I was relieved to see that it was a city beset by writers from across the country. You could spot them everywhere, looking as bewildered as I felt. Through my windshield, which was splattered with a sampling of the entire insectoid biosphere that existed between California and Iowa, I saw a man in a leather jacket holding a portable typewriter like a lunchbox; he appeared to be window-shopping for antiques. I figured this must be the place. But the first time I got to see a dense concentration of these displaced persons (there were twenty-five of us in the incoming fiction class) was at an orientation hosted by Henry Winters, our esteemed teacher and prophet of the short story, and despite the domestic setting, it felt like a singles mixer. People had name tags. Everyone, independently, thought itwould be funny to write obscure literary pseudonyms on their name tags, and then all felt slightly stupid when they realized everyone else had done the same thing. I was chatting up a young woman who’d also written Vivian Darkbloom on her nametag, when a guy with no visible nametag but with an impressive molding of dark hair came up to me and shouted, “Hey, man, fuckin’ Loose Cannons , right? I fuckin’ love that show!” (I suddenly remembered—perhaps not consciously but emotionally, somewhere in the monkey