Seminar

by George Singleton

 

This couple, man and woman, maybe mid-to-late twenties, plopped down beside me and ordered vodka and pineapple juice. We sat in Chattanooga, not Honolulu. The bartendress made the drinks, and garnished them with a maraschino cherry. I kind of side-eyed over. Me, I had the usual. Well, I’d gone down a couple shelves, maybe four. Let’s just say that I drank what Kentucky almost gave away free. My wife worked upstairs in our hotel room.  Genevieve ran her own non-profit, STITCH, an organization that offered free knitting lessons and yarn to the unemployed. The motto’s “Give a person a scarf and he’ll be warm for a while. Teach him how to knit a scarf, and eventually he’ll hang himself.” Not really. I just think that, often, since it’s my job to come up with Trigger and Content Warnings nowadays. I don’t want to get into it, but I had a fiasco in my life earlier that involved punching a dean.

Blood everywhere, right in the middle of a faculty meeting.

Like I said, I’d become unemployable in the world of academe, good riddance, and got hired out to offer Back Cover Trigger Warnings on Classic Reprints, paid piece rate.

So I sat at the bar, notebook open, running down what I’d end up thinking valuable info when I eventually sent notes. The Sound and the Fury: Potential Insensitive Treatment of a Mentally Challenged Person. Invisible Man: Shock Treatment, Prostitutes, Drinking, Racist Terms. Hell, I imagined that I could write out “racist terms” for about every book ever published. Moby Dick: Well, the title. Sanctuary: Corn Cob.

I’d noticed how, at the beginning of movies, warnings showed up that went “Adult Language, Sexual Content, Nudity, Drug Use, Smoking.” Smoking? Really? Anyway, I figured I’d just use these Hollywood warnings as a template. My boss said I had to be thorough and specific, in these litigious times. If I missed out on, say, oral sex, a reader might say he or she underwent horrific panic attacks and sue the publisher, if not the dead writer’s heirs.

Anyway, the woman said to her partner, “‘The steak tartare, which is supposably their specialty, looked like one of the more inexpensive cat foods.’” Her cell phone made that noise when someone hits Send. Shooooom!

I couldn’t hold back—“It’s supposedly, not supposably.”

The guy said, “Who are you?”

I said, “Derrick.” Oddly, too, Der-RICK was the sound that came out of the dean’s nose when I broke it.

The guy said, “Well, Old Man, you might want to mind your own business.”

I thought, Old Man and the Sea: Big Dead Fish. Sharks. Baseball References.

I probably don’t need to tell anyone that a pissant calling me “old man” didn’t go over well. Maybe I stared hard.

The woman said, “Now, now,” for—I guess—she understood what might happen. She held up her palms in the international We Give Up sign.

“Are y’all here for the sensitivity conference?” I asked my bar mates, knowing that I better tone it down.

The man said, “I apologize,” which I thought admirable. I thought, Maybe he’s not an idiot.

The Idiot, by Dostoevsky: Epilepsy.

The woman said, “No. We’re food critics. We write bad Yelp reviews against one of the chain’s competition.”

I tried to grasp her meaning, but got caught up thinking how a Roy Rogers bio would have Trigger in it, often. I ordered another bourbon. I ordered a round, on me. I thought, Genevieve should quit using the terms “slipknot” and “long tail.”

 

George Singleton has published nine collections of stories, two novels, and a book of “writing advice.” His stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, One Story, the Georgia Review, Playboy, Epoch, Agni, Zoetrope, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. He received a Guggenheim fellowship once. He’s a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He lives in Spartanburg, SC.

 

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