Nick Drake is singing "Fruit Tree."I want to call my memoir Way Too Blue.
Sometimes I get in a state of complacency where my novel is concerned. It's not a lack of desire to write, but I don't write. It's not writer's block, but still I don't write.
I realized in the transcribing of chapter seven that I need to make some changes. I realized that the last three or four pages need to go in chapter nine, and chapter seven needs to grow.
Chapter seven is called Interstate. It tracks Randy going across I-10 from the point in Florida where I-75 intersects with 10 and goes west. Randy goes west, in his mother's beat up old Dodge Dart, her ashes in the passenger seat. Randy is planning to take I-10 all the way to California and go north from there to San Francisco. He doesn't make it. The car catches fire in Columbus, Texas, leaving him stranded and rethinking his plans. Change.
Before he gets to Columbus, he spends some time in Houston. That time is captured in chapter ten: Ruckus. At the end of chapter seven, Randy has made an arbitrary goal to not stop to rest until he gets to Houston. He sees the mileage sign to Houston somewhere in Louisiana. The thought of Houston brings to Randy's mind the title character, august chagrin.
But then I've gone too far. I realized that I've written Randy's relationship with August Collins (who becomes august chagrin) in the third person in a nutshell at the end of chapter seven only to repeat it in much better detail in the first person in chapter nine.
I think I gave up on chapter seven too quickly. Randy thinks back on his experiences in Times Square porn theaters, where he contracted HIV and where he met August (he didn't get HIV from August) after an encounter with a man in an interstate rest area. I believe he needs to struggle more with the sex issue, needs to fight off the urge to even recognize that that is what is happening in the rest areas. He needs to stop at more rest stops as he struggles. He needs to become obsessed with the rest stops, stopping at practically every one he comes to, the way he was obsessed with the porn theaters in Times Square. He might not have another actual encounter besides the one I've already written (though he might), but he is hyper aware of the possibility of anonymous sex. His thoughts on nights of sex in New York City come back to him a little at a time. A handsome black man reminds him of Walter (the man from whom he contracted HIV); he runs into truck drivers and married men, transients and nervous college kids -- reread Times Square Red, Times Square Blue -- all of whom have a ready counterpart on the interstate.
Perhaps Randy sees men in the rest stops who remind him of men he was with in New York and those could facilitate flashbacks to the actual encounters, not realized in the rest areas. That could be what compels him forward, compels him to stop again and again, until he has the encounter with the urinal man. Maybe they have unsafe sex, or the man begs for it, and that is what makes Randy feel "guilty" and not want to do anything more, and so he smokes instead. Chain smokes---
