I S S U E 2 2 C R E AT I V E N O N F I C T I O N

Trash
DAN LEACH

I have a former student, now a friend,

who works as a prostitute to offset the
monstrous costs of her graduate degree in
nursing. We catch up from time to time
and, knowing that I am a writer, she tells
me stories about the strange things men
ask her to do. She always ends these
stories by saying, “Put that in your next
book.”

Last time we talked, she told me about a

man who paid for an entire night with
her, except when she showed up to the
hotel, he wasn’t there. Instead she found a
hand-written note with the following
request: “Take a shit in the toilet. After
that, please leave. But make sure you don’t
flush. I want to find it there when I come
up.”
“That’s pretty weird,” I said. “What do you
think it means?”

My friend pretended to think about this

question, but we both knew she had an
answer before she ever called me, and
that, in a certain sense, this answer was
the reason for her call.

“My guess,” she said. “Is that he gets off on

sitting alone in an empty room and
knowing that something happened, but
that he missed it.”

“A fetish for the aftermath,” I said. “That’s

amazing.”

“Then go write it,” she said. “And when it

becomes a best-seller, I expect royalties.”

When I told this story to my wife, she said,

“I wish you hadn’t shared that with me.
It’s inappropriate. The whole situation is
inappropriate.”

I was ready to drop the subject, but I was

also confused on one point. So I asked my
wife, “When you say inappropriate, do
you mean the guy who pays money to
smell a stranger’s shit, or do you mean me
talking to my student about that kind of
stuff?”
“Both,” she said. “But you knew that.”

As much as I like to perform the role of the

aloof artist in search of an honest subject,
I know that most people find it
unacceptable to talk about sex work with
someone you used to teach. I knew this,
but I talked to my student anyway, just like
I knew it would offend my wife to hear the
story, and I shared the story anyway.
Speaking of fetishes, here is mine: I like to
say what I have been told not to say, and
(even worse) I like to pretend that I do not
understand why anyone would deem
anything unsayable.

Writers love to quote Kafka as saying, “A

book must be the ax for the frozen sea
within us.” But no one ever says what the
“frozen sea” is, and neither did Kafka. For
me, it’s “appropriate” conversation.

When I was seven, a teacher overheard

me use the word “fuck.” She removed me
from the classroom and knelt beside me in
the hall, taking my face in her hands as if
it were some fragile vase of inestimable
worth. Then, leaning in so close that I
could smell the apricot tea on her breath,
she whispered, “Daniel, that word you
used is hurtful, and I do not believe that
you want to hurt people. Please promise
me that you will never use it again.” I
promised her that I would never use it
again, but after we returned to the
classroom, I found it impossible to pay
attention to any of the lessons. The word
“fuck” now echoed in my head like a song
you can’t forget until you have played at
the loudest possible volume.

“Be careful,” my wife once warned me,

after reading an essay I had published that
opened with the two of us having sex in a
window in plain view of our neighbors.
“It’s one thing to be transgressive. It’s
another thing to be a showboat.”

My favorite episode of Seinfeld is the one

where George Costanza gets in trouble for
having sex in his office with the cleaning
woman. George’s boss is furious and
confronts him the way a parent berates an
unruly child. But George perfectly adapts
to this configuration by making the face of
absolute innocence. He says, “Was that
wrong? Should I not have done that?”

–
All my favorite characters are absolute
liars. All my favorite people too.

When I was a child, I never wanted to be a

writer. I loved punk music and dreamed
of becoming Joe Strummer. If I had
possessed a modicum of talent on the
guitar, I would be composing songs right
now, not sentences.

The first time I carved something onto a

school desk, I used the sharpened point of
a compass, and I wrote, ASSHOLE. I came
back the next day to find that someone
else had inscribed a message directly
above mine. It read, YUMMY. It was the
first time I realized that all composition is
collaborative.

The best and worst reading experience I

have ever had was when I was eighteen
years old and finished Sylvia by Leonard
Michaels. It was the best experience
because I had never before encountered a
book that felt so much like a punk song.
Michaels wasn’t telling me a story–he was
showing me his heart, even the dark and
deformed parts. It was the worst
experience because I was so young that I
mistakenly assumed there were hundreds
of other books out there that also felt like
punk songs. I had no idea how hard it was
to tell the truth.

What I said about Joe Strummer was a lie.

I am surprisingly decent on guitar, but it’s
written language that I love, and even as a
kid I wanted to be someone who wrote
interesting books. Why misrepresent such
a harmless aspiration? Because I am a
showboat. Because I am a liar.

The worst way to get me to watch a movie

is to tell me how much you loved it.

The best way to get me to watch a movie is

to tell me that something in it was so
unsettling that you had trouble sleeping. I
like the way that people try to explain how
it felt to see Eraserhead for the first time.
My college roommate: “I don’t know what
I just watched, much less what it means. It
just kind of happened to me, and now
here I am. I feel different, but I’m not sure
how.”

–
The day after my old student told me
about getting paid to take a shit in an
empty hotel room, I found myself in the
mood to write a poem. I opened my
notebook and wrote “A Fetish for the
Aftermath” at the top of a blank page. For
about half a minute, I tried to think of an
adequate first line. Then I tore out the
page and scrapped the whole project. Two
people–my student and my wife–already
knew my central metaphor, and that made
the experience of composing the poem as
thrilling as completing a tax form. I want
something so damn good that it just kind
of happens.

The morning I started writing this essay, I

called a writer friend who lives in Las
Cruces to tell him how excited I was about
the project. I got as far as “I’m writing this
thing about how certain words make
certain people uncomfortable and how–”
Then he stopped me and told me a story
about Bernard Malamud rebuking Harold
Brodkey at a cocktail party because
Brodkey was “talking out” too many good
ideas. My friend told me, “If you’re really
excited about this essay, don’t say another
word about it. Hang up the phone and
start writing.”

–
My father, who was a provocateur in his
own right, once told me, “If you’re not
pissing people off, you’re not saying what
you mean.” My mother came behind that
with an equally true aphorism: “If you’re
pissing people off every time you open
your mouth, you’re not thinking before
you speak.” Writing means splitting the
difference between these philosophies.

I have a fantasy that I do not expect will

manifest, at least not in this lifetime. Here
it is: I meet someone for the first time, a
true stranger, and instead of beginning
with small-talk, the stranger blurts out a
truly interesting secret. No names, no
professions, no formalities–just one-
hundred percent intimacy from the first
word between us.

“You only think you want this,” my wife

has reminded me on more than one
occasion. “The truth is, if something like
that ever happened, it would scare the shit
out of you.”

“Not so,” I tell her. “I’ve been preparing

for it my entire life.”

“That may be true,” she says. “But a secret

without context is like a kiss from a blow-
up doll.”
 –

When I am writing, I tend to agree with

Anne Lamott, who said, “Good writing is
about telling the truth.” When I come back
to revise, I find myself in league with
Barry Hannah, who said, “You’ve got to lie
to stay halfway interested in yourself.”

I published a short story on cucking, and

because I shared it on social media, a
distant aunt, a born-again Christian no
less, read it and called my mother to
express her disgust. My mother called me
immediately and demanded I apologize to
the aunt. She said, “I don’t understand
why you can’t just write something nice.”

“Like what?” I said.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Like

dogs. Or love. Stuff that normal people
think about.”

Any day now I will get a call from my

student, the prostitute.

“You want the latest?” she will say.

I will pause before answering, knowing
exactly how I should respond. The
availability of that option never leaves my
sight.

Header photo by Jacelyn Yap

[https://barrenmagazine.com/spring-isnt-
coming/] .

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