Modern Love and Other Tall Tales
- Eight Greg Boyd short stories collected here, providing readers with
an excellent sampling of what our American author of experimental
fiction is all about. Take a good look at the following openings for
five of the tales. At the bottom, I'll hone in on one Boyd blaster that
truly hit home for me, featuring modern day counterparts of Tom Sawyer,
Huck Finn and Jim.
MODERN LOVE
A strange woman called me on
the phone and told me she wanted to be my love slave. I asked her if she
was joking, and whether she's simply picked my number at random from
the phone book. "It doesn't matter," she said. Then she told me in great
detail exactly what she'd like me to do to her and the kinds of things
she was capable of doing to me.
ROBOT DAD
My mother's dead. A
train slammed into her car when she stalled on the railroad tracks. I
was in the front seat with her seconds before it happened. I heard the
horn blow and felt the rails vibrating beneath us. I opened the door and
tried to pull her out with me, but she'd frozen up completely, locked
her hands on the steering wheel.
LISTEN
No, really, why do I
even bother? You're not listening to me. And don't think I can't tell
the difference. I see how you pick up your coffee cup, hold onto it,
swirl what's left around inside. You aren't paying much attention so you
don't hear a word I say. Why pretend? Nobody listens anymore. It's a
lost art.
HORNY
I wake up horny. God's punishing me again,
testing my endurance, so I fall to my knees and pray for strength. But
evil thoughts come through my mind like a polluted stream. I try my best
to purify them. I am chlorine, lava soap. I bubble and foam, but in the
end it happens again anyway. It's always the same. My soul screams at
the exact moment of my body's release.
THE CONFERENCE
Next to
me on the kitchen table, set neatly on a plate to catch the blood, is my
landlady's head. As soon as the water on the stove comes to a boil I'm
going to drop it into the pot to make soup.
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF TOM, HUCK AND JIM
Tom
moved from Missouri out to California six years ago. Los Angeles was
booming back then and Tom cleaned up as a real estate agent. Then things
went bust and Tom had to switch to salesman for a media company.
Tom's
back in the gravy, single now that his wife left him since he could
never keep his hands off the pretty ladies. Anyway, one hot afternoon
Tom stops in at a convenience store and a giant of a man sticks the
barrel of a shotgun in his face. Tom's ordered to get down on the floor.
He watches shotgun and his short partner clean out the till and snatch
everyone's wallets and purses. Added to this, Tom watches the pair pull
out of the driveway - in his car!
Tom gets a call from the
detective on the case - they think they might have the big guy and will
Tom please come down to the station to take a look at the lineup. Tom
does and a funny thing happens when he's eyeballing the men - although
he tells the detective he's sure none of these guys is the robber, Tom
recognizes the guy on the end and asks about him. The detective looks at
his papers and says, "Small time hustler by the name of Sawyer. Huck
Sawyer. Lists his occupation as an actor. Currently unemployed."
At
this juncture in the story, Greg Boyd writes, "On his way back from the
bank, Tom wondered if he wasn't making a terrible mistake. He knew that
in all likelihood he and his childhood friend has drifted so far apart
that they would probably have little in common except for their past,
and thus little to say to each other. Still, his conscience told him
that to turn his back on someone who'd once been like a brother to him
would be an unpardonable sin."
Turns out, Huck is a homeless
drifter who has hooked up with a childhood buddy who fought in Vietnam, a
black man by the name of Jim. The way Greg Boyd shapes his tale of life
along the Southern California river will delight readers of that other
Huck-Tom-Jim tale published in 1884.
American artist and author Greg Boyd, born 1957
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