[APPLAUSE]
Laura, that was a lovely introduction.
Thank you.
It's marvelous to be reading here
at the University of Arizona, my Alma Mater.
I graduated in 1980 something with a degree
in French literature.
And I took my very first creative writing class here
at the UA with Ed Abbey.
I had no idea who he was.
I was like 22, kind of wandered into the classroom,
thinking, oh, creative writing, sounds interesting,
sounds good.
I had no idea it would be the thing that
would begin to scare me and continues to scare me
for the rest of my life.
But Ed Abbey was kind to my really, really bad stories.
They were so bad, so, so, so awful.
So awful that I now use them as examples
in my undergraduate creative writing classrooms.
I hand out the story and take my name off of it
and we talked about all the ways in which this story has
gone bad.
And then I take the copies back, because nobody's leaving
the room with that evidence.
Anyway, here we are back in Arizona.
And this is the final stop of my year long.
My year of the first book, I call it.
The Drue Heinz people were very generous in sending me around
to places and doing readings.
And so I've been to lots of really great podiums
around the country to read these stories.
I'm grateful for that.
And here we are at the-- this is the wrap up of the first book
year.
So thank you for being here.
And it's great to do this in Tucson.
I'm going to read a story that takes about 17 minutes, more
or less.
I just turned to the wrong page.
Here it is.
This is a first person account.
It's a male protagonist from a first person point of view.
So it's not me obviously.
It's called "The Nigerian Princes."
"To silence their noise about giving them grandchildren.
I've let my parents believe that my best friend, Ramone, is
my lover.
They're too old to embrace homosexuality
but they know better than to admit that.
They're in their 70s.
And I'm their only child.
Truth is I can't keep a girlfriend.
Louise looks at me now as if I'm the coffee machine repair
guy, right through me.
I'm sad most of the time.
But let's face it, everyone is sad.
Everyone except Ramone.
He says that Louise is invested in the story of herself
and that I shouldn't give up on her.
He told me he saw her on the roof of our office building
today at lunch, her chin tilted toward the sun
as if her own life were too tragic for this world.
Louise, her hands, her lips, the curve of her brow.
I used to think her face would be with me always.
I would have been there for the aging of those hands,
the wrinkle of that forehead.
I imagine her an old woman, thin skinned, thin haired,
roomy eyed, and beautiful in an Irish cardigan
on the beach in wintertime.
The gulls, the Pipers, the wind bringing blood to her cheeks.
Me, an old man, grateful, and quiet, and finally responsible.
The Nigerian princes were our hobby, Louise and me.
Those assholes stealing money from old ladies
and crazy people.
They offended us.
You'd have to be either sadly naive or mentally ill
to get caught up in their scam.
You'd have to live outside the reach of human interaction,
which on top of everything else, would mean you're also lonely.
This is the demographic they're after.
The unfairness of it killed me.
I can't keep a girlfriend.
And I can't find a wife.
I've been trying.
Ramone will attest to it.
With Louise, I fucked it up again.
I fucked it up good.
My mother is a displacement artist.
She puts things where they don't belong.
When I was a kid arts councils kept getting her grants.
Her work is a statement on consumption and identity
and place.
I'd come home from third grade and find
one of her utilitarian brassieres
in the refrigerator, a cluster of red grapes cradled
in each cup.
The family weed whacker encrusted with Bermuda
mounted inside a gilt frame on the dining room wall.
In the supermarket I'd wander away from her bored
and among the comic books I'd come
upon a dozen key lines displayed in an open egg carton,
a tidy row of Idaho russet potatoes
set atop stacks of spiral bound notebooks.
My father is a literature professor, emeritus retired.
Charles Dickens was the center of my childhood.
If Dickens were alive and in need of a baggage handler
or someone to suck his dick.
My dad would have been the man for the job.
"Fagella for Dickens, your husband."
Ramone told my mother authoritatively last year
at the seder table.
The old man had just delivered to us
a fresh theory refuting the accusations of anti-Semitism
in Oliver Twist.
Ramone loves my mom, idiot that he is.
Also he'll eat anything, including
her horrendous cooking.
He's freakishly accomplished at dinner table conversation.
So his presence of holiday meals works out for everyone.
My mother guffawed lovingly at Ramone, wiped tears of laughter
with her palsy arthritic hand.
Dad grinned amiably through his deafness.
Ramone is neither gay nor Jewish.
Incoming inter-office email from Louise.
Forgiveness, it says.
Forgiveness is for pussies.
My mother thinks Louise is my fag hag.
This according to Ramone, in whom she confides.
Ramone thinks Mom's a scream.
But consider the context, Ramone was
raised by human traffickers.
He spent much of his childhood in the back
of unmarked vans, stinky with the sweat of individuals
scared shitless.
He'd have been thrilled to find an unwashed carrot and a can
of sardines in his lunchbox as I did in seventh grade
four days in a row.
In the break room at work, Ramone
eyes a bowl of chocolate kisses somebody
brought to Valentine's Day.
The office is lousy with glitter and sugar.
Ramone needs to lose about 80 pounds.
'She still loves you, dude' he says.
'Don't be intimidated by the evil eye'
I told him about the email she sent this morning. 'Yeah.
Well, he says the woman's got to vent.
Venting is what you want, believe me'
'You don't know shit' I tell him.
'Not true, he says, succumbing to the Hershey's.
'I do know shit.
Shit I learned from you in fact.
For example, I know that Nigerian princes
can be real assholes' 'Fuck you, Ramone' I
fish around for dark chocolate kiss, 'And keep your voice down
for Christ's sake'
Harassing the Nigerian princes was something Louise
and I could do together.
We knew that couples split up when
they don't have common interests, like surfing,
or scrapbooking, or smoking weed.
Until we started fucking with the Nigerian princes,
Louise and I were heading down that road.
She had her bitter feminist book group and her beer
drinking rock climbers.
And I had my Neanderthal white guy football
Sundays and my language poetry workshop.
The Nigerian princes brought us back to one another.
Louise has a wicked dark imagination
and a pitch perfect understanding
of character development.
Her knack for detail is astonishing.
'Meet me at the Lufthansa baggage carousel number five
in Oslo,' she'd emailed a Nigerian prince.
I'll be wearing a desert camouflage maxi
skirt and a black pageboy wig.
Africans make me anxious, so be sure to approach slowly
and leave any tribal accouterments, masks,
and spears, and whatnot back in your village.
I'll get my nephew to strap the cash to my upper thigh.
And we'll probably need your help
retrieving it, considering my bulk prevents me
from accessing certain parts of my body lol' Louise would
cackle as she typed, lying on her stomach on the bed,
laptop before her.
This would make me hard as a rock.
I'd lift up her skirt and pull up her hips
and slip inside her.
Bent over the keyboard, she'd cackle and type, type
and cackle and moan.
Louise and I weren't alone in our preoccupation with Nigerian
prince harassment.
There were clubs, websites, support groups.
It's not as if we were the only people
to pursue our hobby on company time either.
A guy from Massachusetts named Leon
runs a listserv for counter scammers out of his cubicle
at Google.
Difference is he's not an ignorant ass
hole pointed out Louise.
The night we came home from work stunned and freaked
out at the news that the company's mainframe
had been hacked.
And the credit card numbers of 20,000 customers
stolen and by the likelihood that our taunting
of the Nigerian princes was responsible.
Incoming interoffice email from Jerry,
my boss, your external audit interview
scheduled for next Tuesday.
It's only a matter of time before they figure out it
was us or Louise technically.
Because I was the one who told her
my computer was offline when actually it wasn't that night
months ago when she and I took a graveyard
shift for the overtime pay working
all night in jeans and t-shirts and a maze of empty cubicles.
First we fucked in my office chair, and then in hers,
then in our department manager's.
Then we decided to fuck with the Nigerians for a little while.
And I knew somewhere in a dark corner of my idiot reptilian
brain that sending emails to Nigeria from your desktop
was the sort of thing that gets you fired.
It was me who told her it would be OK,
it would be fine to use her computer.
No way they'd find out.
No way they'd even care.
I told her it would all be fine.
And then in my despair, I admitted to her what I'd done.
At which point, she started rightfully to hate me.
Louise has a kid named Janie, a six-year-old with blue eyes
and red curly hair and fucking cerebral palsy.
Pre-existing conditions of the yin yang
dependent on company health care for her meds,
her wheelchair, her oxygen tank, her physical therapists,
her specialists, her daycare her survival.
Louise's anger at me is primal."