Junior Willis by Richard Natale

Author:Richard Natale [Natale, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626391659
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2014-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

*

Over the next two weeks, Tom worked at a rapid pace, polishing off three hour-long assignments. He rarely stepped away from then typewriter except to sleep, and then it was a fitful slumber. His brain was on overdrive, constantly feeding him new scene ideas, as well as viable solutions to nagging continuity problems, which he frequently wrote down in a notepad he kept on the bedstand.

He stayed so busy that, for the most part, Junior Willis had little room to invade his consciousness and then only after he’d had a few drinks and conjured the boy up in his mind, focusing not on their conversations but on the proportions of his biceps and forearms, his solid legs and thighs and that alluring combination of youthful gawkiness and self-possession. Since the real Junior Willis was unattainable, he would fondle his imaginary twin, and afterwards confide the details of his day, about which the phantom boy always expressed a keen interest.

Next morning, as he reached for aspirin to treat his hangover, he’d deride himself as a pathetic fool, then down his shame along with the aspirin tablets and once again lose himself in work.

Having completed his assignments ahead of schedule, Tom tossed the plastic wrapper over the typewriter and gave himself a night off. Initially, he considered phoning Harold, but decided against it. Instead, he slipped into a pair of his roomiest madras shorts and an undershirt and plunked down in an easy chair with a bowl of pretzels and a beer to watch some television. More precisely, he sat in front of the TV set while it flickered and droned, since he had already given himself over to the familiar melancholy that had plagued him since the first time he had allowed a man to stir his demons.

The sadness was persistent. Some idle time and a little alcohol brought it bubbling to the surface. Harold used to tease him about it. “Here comes Gloomy Gus,” he’d say when Tom walked in with a dour expression on his face. “The trouble with you is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Guess what, honey? We’re all damned. So why not just give in and enjoy yourself in the meantime?”

Whenever he allowed dark thoughts free reign, the air around him would grow thick and stifling; the familiar would suddenly turn alien and threatening. Though he’d been living in the same house for the better part of a decade, he often felt like a squatter, someone who had once sought refuge in an abandoned space and come to mistake it for home. Except for that eight by ten portrait on the mantelpiece Colonel Dore had taken of him, a stranger entering the house wouldn’t have a clue as to who lived there. The furnishings, bought new, were suffering from benign neglect. A housekeeper came once a week, so the place was dusted, the floors vacuumed or damp mopped every Saturday. But some of the wallpaper seams were coming unstuck, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.