Thanks to readers who have sent ahead questions for tomorrow’s Zoom gathering. One is about the comic voice, and today’s flash post is a way of thinking about comedy in prose. Is comedy something you can practice and learn? I think it is, and if you’re curious about the skills involved, please come to the conversation. You can RSVP to: lauriestone@substack.com, and I’ll send you a link. We’ll gather from 3 to 4 pm EST tomorrow, July 22. It’s free to paying subscribers, and you can subscribe at the button below for as little as $3.75 for one month. Other techniques on the list for tomorrow’s conversation are using jump cuts in prose and also ways to produce an image. Where do they come from? Can you learn to produce them? Again, I think you can, and I’ll unwrap some ways I’ve found them.
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Wheel
I passed a truck on Broadway filled with running shoes. Outside a woman was writing prizes on a wheel—“Pen,” “Water Bottle,” “T-Shirt,” “Shoes.” She had shiny brown hair. I said, “What’s going on?” She said, “We’re giving away free prizes.” My mother used to say, “Nothing is free. There is always a catch.”
The woman said she taught yoga, and it struck me yoga doesn’t care why you need to be calm. You could be calming yourself before robbing a bank. I was wearing flip-flops, and the soles of my feet were black. I was on my morning walk down the backbone of the city with bed hair.
A crowd gathered around the truck. We were birds on a telephone wire. The yoga teacher looked out and made a show of considering the group. Then she took my arm and said, “You spin first. You have waited patiently.”
I had done no such thing. I had kept checking my watch and returning sharp little answers to her polite questions about my life. I didn’t want to work for a t-shirt or a pen. Why does polite conversation feel like work? Why does it feel like a holdup in a bank? Why am I telling you the truth of my nature?
The joggers and floaters wanted the shoes. People in wheel chairs wanted the shoes. Suddenly the yoga teacher noticed that the rubber stopper thing was missing from the spinning wheel. She sent some people to search for it in the truck. When it couldn’t be found, she said to me, “Spin it, anyway.” I said, “Okay. Whatever stops at the top can be the prize.” She said, “Great.” I gave the wheel a tug, and around it flew. Everyone watched. It was exciting.
The wedge where “shoes” was written soared to the top and then raced to the bottom and then up it went again and down. The wheel didn’t slow. It was charged with supernatural momentum. As it was turning, the yoga teacher whispered to me, “I want you to win.”
I was delighted. Ah, I thought I’ve charmed her. But as the wheel kept turning, there was time for second thoughts. Maybe she’d taken me for one of the entrepreneurial street people who had recently set up shop on Broadway. They camped on the sidewalk, wrote in notebooks, and poured over novels behind signs that asked for donations while they weathered “a rough patch.” Every so often they’d look up with a surprised, amused expression at passersby in suits. My life wasn’t all that different.
The yoga teacher was holding a shoe and after the wheel had spun enough times and showed no signs of slowing, she stopped it with the shoe and called out, “You win!” It was as if the universe had rolled toward me, even though I don’t believe in the universe. The yoga teacher said to one of her colleagues, “Bring our winner a pair of shoes.” I said, “Thank-you.” I was happy for reasons beyond my understanding. A second young woman asked for my shoe size and returned with a box. I slipped on silver shoes with hot pink soles and iridescent, green stripes, shoes I would never wear. Team members took pictures of my feet. I wondered if people would see how dirty they were.
The shoes were springy, and I walked around, smiling, the whore, and I remembered being ten and being asked to appear in a film a crew was making about the new library at school. There I was with my pigtails and child’s whore face. My mother had been a shy, aloof person who didn’t want her emotions spread on toast for everyone to see. She was dead now, and I was sad, wishing I could show her the shoes. She would have said, “How did you win them?” I would have said, “Pity.” She would have said, “That’s the catch.”
“A surprised, pitying expression”--not how I expect to see homeless people described and a subtle prefiguring of “pity” in the last paragraph. This is not the first instance I have noticed of an internal resonance in your writing, and sometimes other people’s (mine on a good day). I can’t attend your next workshop but would be interested in your thoughts on how it happens and how this seemingly little thing can enlarge the piece.
Love this one. My mom used to tell me a story about a school dance where the girls were requested to throw one of their shoes in a pile. The boys then had to race and match the shoes to their owners. One matched my mom’s immediately and won a prize because of how ugly her shoes were!... pity