Fiction: I Am a Prayer(Excerpt from the novel)

By Michael Hanson

[Editor’s Note: I Am a Prayer is the author’s latest published novel (Atmosphere Press, November 15, 2022). It is about loss and gifts, and the efforts we make to find meaning in life when tragedy is an inescapable aspect of love. Raymond Shackleford’s journey takes him to a variety of venues — from a dance club to the depths of his own past — but it will be a chance encounter with a stranger that changes everything.] 

My friend Lauren always said, ‘Write the ending you want.’
    My first love, or real one, anyway. At a time when being a ‘carrot top’ made me a ready target for ridicule, the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, the one I’d soon learn was Lauren Joselove, told me one day as we were walking out of class that I had ‘amazing’ hair.
    I won’t deny it—the second a girl’s nice to me I’m hooked.
    So at 14 I fell hard for Lauren, a dark-skinned Jewish beauty with big lips and brown eyes and a smile that slayed me—she shared Homeroom and American History. Think what you want, but the fact that I was only 14 made no difference—what I felt was love, damnit, something any age can claim ownership of. And when it became clear she didn’t reciprocate my crush (amazing hair be damned, she was going steady with Adam Ralston), I decided that life was a long series of disappointments stopping only at death—and of course the Catholic in me questioned even that, Satan waiting on the other side to ice the shitcake. What’s still a shock is that Lauren, with a skill I wished she’d share with every girl on Earth, not only let me down easy, she reassured me of my worthiness even as she rejected me. The very week I’d made my futile play (just an offhand remark about seeing a movie with me), she attended a track meet in which I lost the 100-meter by a hair.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said, me stunned she was even standing there, wasn’t avoiding me like the plague. ‘But I tell you what—you looked better losing than that guy did winning. You looked better than all those guys. You’ve got great legs and you run like it’s your calling.’
    This hit home: running is the only thing I’ve ever done that feels easy and comes naturally, something I don’t have to work at to do well. So it shouldn’t have been surprising that when we both ended up at Hancock High we became best friends—truth is, it didn’t take long to learn that hanging out with a beautiful girl is better than being popular with a bunch of dudes, even if the dating she was doing never ceased to sting a little. But Lauren was worth it. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met, with some kind of weird angle on virtually everything, a slant whose source was always a mystery to me—as high school students went, she was an oddball, only not a soul would deny that she was also the best-looking girl in the whole school, or right up there. The thing is, Lauren knew it, too, only her knowing didn’t manifest itself as conceited—while acknowledging the advantages her good looks gave her, she downplayed the importance of those advantages, or at least the depth of them. (My mom always said Lauren was ‘born older.’) Her sense of humor was always at the ready, too, something I couldn’t get enough of—sardonic, sure, but oftentimes she was its easiest target, as when she quipped that no guy should have to put up with cynicism from a girl as pretty as she was. I kid you not—she could say such things and pull it off, no problem. She was whip-smart and studied like it was a privilege, whereas Yours Truly groped his desperate way through damn-near every single subject, a few of which—geometry, biology, chemistry—probably would’ve cut short my high school career had Lauren not been there to drag me through them. She could explain things, simplify them, better than any teacher, and concepts that in class left me completely mystified she’d elucidate with analogies that made sense to me—geometry problems graphed onto athletics, about which I was passionate; principles of biology clarified using animals, since I seemed to prefer them to people; chemistry . . . well, I remained clueless about chemistry, but by god she got me through it (no one was ever happier to receive a D in a class). And with regard to the guys she went steady with, some part of me probably resented it, but those guys were there and gone in a blink, relatively speaking, whereas I was always in her favor. (The few dates I managed to score in four years of high school were, I’m certain, the result of my being linked with Lauren—they deigned me worthy of dating because she was my best friend.)
    We even went away to University together here in Atlanta, where we’d both earn Bachelor degrees (me in English, Lauren in Geology). In all honesty, that move to ‘the Big City’ would’ve crippled me were it not for her company. Atlanta might not be New York, but coming from Ferndon I couldn’t imagine a more imposing metropolis—skyscrapers, city parks sooty with pigeons, cars frickin’ everywhere, crawling along in endless lines like colored chain-links. To say nothing of the people, so many people, throngs of us hairless uprights from every conceivable socio-economic stripe, the filthy rich right next to the plain filthy, and between them all the rest of us, striving to stay afloat under the weight of one another—to me the city seemed like barely-contained chaos ready to erupt any minute. The sheer energy of the place threatened to crush me with its bleak anonymity. But Lauren loved it, thrived on it, and the confidence she always carried—partially yours by virtue of being near it—was only heightened by the hectic environs.
    The result was that I began, for the first-ever time, to see myself as Someone, a person capable of . . . well . . . something. Clichéd or not, college marked the point at which I began to be myself, or—better—became conscious of the self I was becoming. It was also when I started paying strict attention to performance, particularly my grades, my reputation in classes—I’d been barely scraping by all those years, but now I was sincerely interested, had hooked into Lauren’s notion of learning for learning’s sake, knowledge as power and all that. My escalating GPA proved I might not be as worthless as I’d always felt, my stepfather’s relentless disdain be damned. Lauren, who’d always excelled at everything, kept up her enviable stride in college, graduating summa cum laude with nearly a 4.0. I’d joke that the only reason she hung out with me was to stay in touch with the little people.
    She’d joke right back: ‘Despite appearances, there’s nothing even remotely little about you, Ray. Except maybe your Johnson.’
    Never mind that she’d never even seen my Johnson. Lauren could put guys in their place with just a look.
    After graduation she pressed on for her Master’s, but since I wasn’t sure what to focus on with regard to grad school I just stuck around the city, eventually taking a clerical job in the University’s Records and Transcripts Office.
    Welcome to the world of a Simpleton: I graduated from college but never left campus.

*

It took just under two years for Lauren to complete her Master’s, after which she landed an assistantship at Caltech in Pasadena—it was only for a year, but was renewable, so she crossed fingers and made the move. This, in turn, led to her accepting a full-time teaching position a year later. Her leaving Atlanta had felt a lot like being on my own for the first time, but by then I had a few pals and even a date every now and then. The duplex I’d moved into was sweet enough that for the first time in my life I started having company, inviting people over and showing it off like a pad. The apartment was right in the heart of Midtown, at that time the section of the city I spent most of my time in, the place a mecca for cultured types (not that I considered myself one of them)—museums and theatres, parks and shops, bars and restaurants that never closed. Mine was one of only six units clinging to the leafy fringe of Piedmont Park: along with the nonstop grind of traffic, into my morning window wafted birdsong and kids’ voices (using the park as a school cut-through), the occasional hollow echo of a basketball from some sunrise shooter. Plus, being in the gay district made me kind of a hot commodity—no idea why, but gay men have always been good to me in a way that regularly elicits gratitude, lavishing me with compliments about my clothes, my hair, making it clear that if ever I decided to switch teams . . .
    Whereas with women it’s always felt like an uphill slog.
    ‘You’re too sensitive for most women, Ray.’
    Lauren never held back her opinion, even when it sounded like criticism.
    ‘I thought women liked sensitive men.’
    ‘That’s because you’ve been sold that idea. By women. But if you look around you, you’ll see the guys getting the girls are usually power players. It’s just like high school. They say they’re looking for Mr. Sensitive, but if the stupid quarterback shows any interest they’ll start claiming what a great guy he is, like no one knows the real him. Women want a guy who can take care of business, bottom line. Sucks for you.’
    You notice how she left herself out, like she wasn’t one of them? I bit my tongue.
    Despite the 3,000 miles then dividing us, we stayed well-connected anyway, between calls and emails, plus she made sporadic trips back home to visit her folks in Ferndon. Regardless where we lived, we were in it for the long haul.
    ‘You’re a keeper,’ she’d say.
    Her boyfriends came and went, same as always. I’d hear these stories. But it got to the point where I hardly bothered remembering their names anymore, well aware they wouldn’t be around all that long. Much as I loved Lauren, I learned to be grateful not being her guy. Measuring up to her was a tall order—I had a hard time conjuring the cat who might manage to make a real go of it.
    It was during my first year in the Transcript office that I somehow managed to buckle down and write a novel, a rarely-shown capacity for audacity I still feel decent about, especially since it psyched me out in ways I never anticipated. Sure it was a lousy novel, but hey—at least I’d done it, fulfilling every English major’s fantasy, mine concocted on the coattails of reading Johnson’s Rasselas. And when Lauren shared her mantra about writing the ending I wanted, my assumption was that she was referring to my recently-written novel, whose ending (I’d admitted) wasn’t what I envisioned. I knew it needed to be reworked (hell, whose first novel doesn’t?), but I wasn’t sure of the way, the method, and Lauren’s blunt advice cut through a lot of costly, endless speculation. I knew the essence of how I wanted the book to end, but the limitless options to best capturing it kept me spinning my wheels far longer than necessary—until she threw the switch with those five simple words.
    Lauren, of course, was way ahead of me, same as always—she was talking about something bigger than my book.
    Over the years she had shaped her whole philosophy around this notion, her own way of saying we could create whatever reality we wanted. Not in any half-baked, new agey sense—she was the first to admit that life couldn’t be controlled, that a huge portion of humanity got a bad rap by being born into a dire situation they’d never escape the clutches of, and it wasn’t because they were lazy or weak or unimaginative: she pitied people who supposed such things, called them crackpots.
    ‘Getting out of a slum,’ she’d say with a smirk, ‘takes a lot more than “creative visualizations”.’
    No, what Lauren meant was that life saddles us with adversities we don’t necessarily bring on ourselves—it might be genetics, or bad parenting or poverty, or it might just be plain bad luck—but instead of pissing and moaning the injustice, those of us fortunate enough to have a few resources should take the trial as an opportunity for growth, something that can teach us. It’s her version of the whole Huxley thing, that experience is what we make of what happens to us.
    Me, I’d learn this firsthand after a bad break-up. (What I learned from that break-up was that dating the chick-in-question didn’t show me at my wisest.) Lauren, into her third year at Caltech, ditched it and moved back to Atlanta, claiming to have had her fill of the overly-competitive academic life.
    ‘They’re like politicians. Forget teaching and learning: we were all in training to be pit bulls.’
    The fact that she made this move during the thick of my break-up couldn’t have suited me better, but I was niggled by an insidious guilt about all she’d sacrificed, especially when the job she ended up getting was as a groundskeeper for University Facility Services, taking care of the dozens of flowerbeds and ‘edible gardens’ dotting our former college campus. I figured she’d lost her mind.
    She assured me otherwise, that this was in no way a sacrifice. Lauren was on a different kind of fast-track.
    ‘This has nothing to do with you, Ray. Really, I’m saving myself. Caltech might look good on paper, but I’ve had it with all that. Fuck my CV. It’s a charade. Everyone sucking up to the department-head, back-biting for tenure, belittling everyone else’s research. At least now I have my hands in earth all day. It’s civilized.’
    The proof of all this was as obvious as the dirt perpetually gathered under her anything-but-girlish fingernails—she took to the job like it was all she’d ever wanted, like it was in her genes or something. Which in a way it could’ve been: Lauren’s parents back in Ferndon were passionate gardeners who not only grew most of the vegetables the family ate every day, they also raised chickens, goats, and this was long before it became fashionable to do such things, back in the days before words like “sustainability” had become part of the suburban vernacular. There were no toys in Lauren’s backyard growing up, no swing sets or jungle gyms—it was all garden, rows and rows of tilled earth, bamboo stalks hairy with string and climbing vines.
    ‘When the Apocalypse comes,’ she’d say, ‘we’re headed right back home. My folks have got everything we’ll need.’
    I remember one gin-soaked night the two of us were laughing at our early days, my adolescent stab at romance, and I—overcome with gratitude that the girl I’d pined after was still my best friend—remarked how amazing it was we’d gotten to this place: 30 years old and neither able to imagine a life without the other.
    ‘We made it,’ says the Sentimentalist, lifting my G-and-T in toast.
    But she corrects me simply by changing the emphasis of the very words I’d used.
    ‘No, Ray, we made it.’
    Looks to me like her eyes fill up, and anyway mine do, what with the serious stare she’s giving me, and the way she takes my hand like a lover before saying, ‘It’s true. We’re where we are because we made it. Every day, every year. Pat yourself on the back for that.’
    She reaches her right hand over her left shoulder, pats herself on the back. I do likewise, shaking my head. Then she laughs and adds, ‘You know what I’m about to remind you, right?’
    I do, but just smile and nod, knowing she’ll say it.
    ‘Write the ending you want.’

Copyright © 2022 by Michael Hanson