Pennyroyal

I'm driving in my car a lot of the time. I work for the Magazine "Cold Creek". It started out as this author's pool. Back in the sixties, a couple of guys from the College of Arts and Sciences in Illinois got together and made an open-submission magazine for authors to publish short stories. Two of them still kick around the office, talking about social revolution and commies and utter nonesense. I've worked there five years. I started out as a reader and then workign in ads. The magazine had become a little bit of a different beast in recent years. Two of the founders split off and made their own magazine, called "Dragon Kings" that continued the tradition of open submission. We dropped the habit. Since the eighties, the magazine has been a fashion catalogue. We still took stories, but only from established writers. Once a year, we published a "Rising Star" article where a no-name author was chosen for the Christmas issue. You can't sell your whole soul, now can you? There's a minute of heart there. Problem is, We always pick a no-name with an award, or a lost old author risen from the dead. And the public had started to know, too. We lacked substance. And all our readers had started reading "Dragon Kings." There's an internet protect chatboard and petition. We get a lot of hate mail.


A submission:
"When you move into mainstream schlock like "Cold Creek", you begin to tread the territory of Dentist-office homogenaety. This ships's sinking, and the vultures smell dry blood. Finally, it looks like the forces of good might pull down a giant."


I had that one on my cubicle wall. I'm 30. 30-year olds don't steer the course of destiny like older men. You must be forty to be the captain, and until that moment, the man keeps you under your thumb. I feel like I escaped that fate a long time ago. I started an article as filler once. It was a lsow month. We had two sick photographers, so we needed a block of print. I filled in. I wrote a memoir of life in a town called Hogtown. This was four months ago. It was an instant success. We got a pile of mail and internet buzz about it. It had a "small-town boy in the big city" appeal. There's no town called Hogtown. The setting was fictional. People assumed that I came from Hogtown, and it was a substitute for a real one.

People can be like bees when it comes to information. And the bees flock to the hive. The internet. I get on every night and check a handful of sites looking for a blip. It makes me happy when I find one. It's like a ripple on the surface of the information ocean, dedicated entirely to me. In four years, I've managed to get four articles put in. Two were news pieces, and two were fluff fiction. I don't get paid enough to submit text to be denied. I spend most of my time running ads and aarranging pages. And meetings. Damn those meetings.

So, all in all, I enjoy, at best, an offbeat writer position for a third-rate magazine on the verge of public meltdown.

I wanted to jump ship. I wanted to make my mark and move it. And I saw my chance with the filler article that inexplicably went big. I'd written three followups, one a month. Musings on the difference between city life an dcountry life. What it was like to go to swim in the Salem River, what it felt like to run through the fields of Farmer Bells' corn crop. None of these things had happened. I went to a farm once as a kid. I mean, I was raised suburban. Grew up with a wuarter acre lot down the street from a Wendy's where I used to make out with Emily, my neighbor. In and of itself a plethora of cute stories, but the public was buying in huge to the rural stories of 80's isolationist pluck. I was a strange kind of Buffalo Bill, filling in the gaps in people's lives that can only be expressed by frontier living. I wrote it as if it had been submitted to my desk by an old friend. This at least was some saving grace, as people assumed it was me, but it allowed me to have that fictional character.

But people were convinced it was real. Small-town submitters from all over were sending letters saying that they knew the code and knew what town I was talkign about. The Letters to the ditor had at least one submission a week with a person holding claim that James T. Hayworth, my friend, was from no ther than their hometown. It had become real for people, and I worried.

And so I guess it goes. I think that the legend never involved much of anything, that maybe I struck a nerve in small town people and their inadvertant testimony ended up applying a stamp of authenticity that my stories didn't Have. No matter how outlandish or cornpone my stories, people found a way to believe that I knew of the goings-on of their hamlet. Tell truth, it built me up. Before, when the weather was nice, I used to pace my front yard and smoke like an animal on exhibit. When we started getting the letters, I felt freer. I got a raise on the second installment, and I started throwing a lot of parties. I met Amber, a cute bartender that I got that goosebump feeling for. I moved into a better apartment. Life was in an upswing, and I felt like a little hero. Amber moved in and we bought those little Japanese pine trees. Hers looked beautiful, all full of artful moves and sublte little swirls. Mine was more of a... model really. It was a little too perfect. Kinda looked like I'd glued it all together and taken a snapshot.

Back when I lived in Peoria, I might hav been able to pull off some sort of small-town legitemacy in my stories. These days, I lived exclusively in Chicago. Pretty much any connection I had with the world outside of the city was evaporated in the years 1998 through 2000. During that time period, I never left the city proper. never even visited the burbs. I lived from my apartment to work to the deli, occasionally stopping off for movies or to get drunk. I think it was during that time that I really became a full-fledged denizen of this city, for good or ill.

Maybe it was getting to me. I felt like a fraud. I'd never lived a small town life, and people were going to see through. When I'd write about old man Willow's Candy store and barber shop, someone would jump up and cry:


"False! This man is leading us on a web of lies. William S. Henderson no more grew up in Hogtown than Sinatra lived in Tokyo. Henderson was born in Peoria, Illinois, on August of 1979. He knows no such person as James T. Hayworth, and he makes these stories up, mostly as a gimmick to humiliate and stereotype the rural lifestyle. The whole story has been revealed to me, and soon it will be to you."


It had come out this week. I'd just published my fourth installment and put a little money aside in the bank when I got the call. Ted, the copy manager at the office, had conducted a little espionage. His girlfriend worked for Paper Street Publishing, and had done the print run for an upcoming installment of "Vigor", a top running serial that was popular for men between the ages of 19 and 25. That was our core audience. It was going to makethe exact above claim in the upcoming edition. I was ruined. To add insult to injury, my downfall was probably going to tear the mag down as well. I'd become a bright spot in an otherwise mostly sagging rag, and all it ended up being was a shiner target for snipers.

That'd put a cramp in the old jobhunting experience. The guy who pulled down "Cold Creek". Solid. In one week, I couldn't work for the Hogtown Gazette, real or fictional.

What's worse, Jenna found out about it.

Jenna was the daughter H. Howard Seitz, one of two members of the original crew. She was the star writer for the "Creek", and had a piece in every edition since March of 2002, when she was on vacation. She's 27, and driven. She has huge tits, she's blonde. And she's an amazing writer. She's never had cause or reason for doubts in herself. Growing up rich, attractive, and smart... there's no need for self-doubt. She's always cut to teh core of the issue, and her candid analysis of everything from clothes to movies has given her a sycophantic following. She's the early center of a media empire, and there's no denying. it. This magazine is ike an extraneous organism. She can live without it, but she puts in a submission every month, because she knows we'll pay her too much for it, and she knows that it's the mainstay of the entire thing. I like to say that if I went down in a hail of gunfire, the magazine would go down with me, but it isn't true. I'm anovelty, at best, but Jenna is the mast and sail. If she left, the whole thing would go.

And her dad knows it. It's a strange thing, really. I was working here when she started. She had a prep school degree in communications, and we all accepted before she arrived that she was daddy's girl, riding the silver spoon on into her adult years. A job as a writer at Daddy's magazine? Cushy, and easy.

We were startled shortly thereafter. She went on a spontaneous investigation into strip clubs, and her photos and article won her an award. I'd like not to say which one, it makes me sick to think about. She did another piece, and another. She was a machine. Before long, the magazine began to revolve around her article. When it was late, we'd stay awake nights worrying. When it was early, we'd throw parties and be giddy knowing we'd make another print. She was the cornerstone. Never showed up to our parties, except once when she was really drunk.

So I always felt like a little fish next to her. Millionaire heiress, media darling, writer extraordinaire. She was the post-modern self-styled female James Bond. I bet she knew Karate. I'd have little daydreams when she'd walk through the office. While everyone else was staring at her tits, I'd be imagining us fighting it out, kung-foo style.

Her gaze would shift as she walked down the aisle between the Chucks (tow guys named Cuck, one fat, one skinny. Both ogling her.) and a blad would appear out of her kimono. One slice, both necks. Hong Kong blood... everwhere.

I'd rise from my desk. Close up shot of my eyes, looking intense. A little text at the bottom: "you killed my father. I will avenge him."

"Come." Again, this time her lips moving to mismatched sound. "Let us settle this."

We fight. My wakizashi, hidden in my briefcase, comes flying up into my hand as I deftly kick it with my foot and flick it upward with my toe. I draw steel.

She pulls her straight katana hgih above her head, elbows bent. Sexy, sexy.

We run at one another. I bring my sword down, and so does she. At the last moment, I duck and parry, deflecting her blow over my head and behind. We both step past, gazing away from one another, poised like Praying Mantisesready to turn around and deliver a counterstrike. We do.

Like snapping whips, we bring out blades together. That scraping sounds heard only in stock theatre pops and sings as our blades dance above our heads. She gets a shallow scrape across my cheek and ear, drawing blood. I duck low, pulling my smaller blad between us. I stab downward, below her ribcage. My blade digs deep into her abdomen and she falls back. I hang onto the blade and wiggle. It is then that I feel a wetness on my lower back and running down my leg. She stabbed me. The pain lances aross my back and I realize she's dug a line from my spine to halfway across my ribcage, five, six inches deep. I pull up on my blade, trying to inflict as much damage as I could before I lost the strength to hold on.

She lost her grip first. She fell back, slack, as I continued to hold onto the handle of my blade. I do so for a minute before I realize she's breathing shallowly. I fall back, twisting the sword in my back and jolting me. My hands release the hilt and I cough up blood. She's having a hard time breathing. I'm laying prone on my stomach, trying to arc my head up a bit to keep my nose out of the puddle of my own blood poooling on the thinly carpeted floor. hong Kong blood. Watery. Everywhere.

The glow fades from our eyes, tow old salty samurai dying next to one another in a great shakespearean tragedy.

Tits.

"Hey, are you listening to me? Perry told me the news."

"Huh?"

"Perry told me about the upcoming article."

"Perry knows?"

"Perry, me, the boss, Ted. Ted's really fond of telling the story by this point. Pretty much everyone will know by the end of the day." She smirked a little. "What are you going to do?"

"I dunno, I guesss I'll come up with something."

"Well, you'd better. Because I think Daddy Warbucks is gonna pull your plug unless you do some real creative thinking."

"I guess I'd better."

By late afternoon, I hadn't. I spent the early part of the day calling for advertising. Chump work to pass the time. In the early afternoon, I had a little meltdown and went into the archive room and looked through old stock photos just to get away from everybody. When I got back to my cubicle, there was a post-it note on my monitor.

"Come by my office around 4:30". A note from Sietz. I'd managed to stay under his radar most of my existence at "Cold Creek" and I hated any confrontation I ever had with him. And there was going to be a showdown tonight. He wanted magic, and I needed to deliver.

I wanted the time to pass slowly, but it didn't as it is with everythign in life, when you want something to delay coming to pass, it always hastened.

And so it was, I stared at the clock until 4:25 rolled around. I stirred in my seat. I finally sucke di tup and got up and marched to his office. he had one of those with a door. I knocked on it. No response. I knocked again while opening it, and peered inside.

"Hey, thought I was going to miss you." His voice came from behind me. I jumped.

"Oh, hey, uhm, yeah. I was just..."

"Come on in for a minute, I won't keep you."

"Thanks."

He walked briskly over to his desk and sat down, crossing his hadns over the desk. "You know that "Vigor" is going to publish a story about the fraudulence of your article. You know I know this. What would you do in my position?"

"I'd ask me to, uh, think creatively."

"Do so. What are you going to do about this?"

"I dunno." It was those times when the shit hits the fan when you get the best ideas. You can go a whole afternoon without direction, but it's something about go-time, when it's balls to the wall. You get ideas. "I think I might try to do something with the internet fans."

"I don't follow."

"Well, uh, I think there's a bunch of people who say that the town I write about is their hometown. I thought maybe I could start a competition..."

"This sounds complicated. I wasn't thinking..."

I cut him off. Dumb move, but I was on a roll. "I'd host a competition where there would be a real Hogtown, and people would have to find out where it is."

"How will you do that?"

"I dunno, pick a town at random. I'll just find a place and use it."

"Let me think for asecond..." he took off his glasses and looked at his desk for a minute. "So you're saying that you want to research a town and use it as a real location for your stories?"

"Shouldn't be too hard."

"No, I really like it. We could offer a reward for the person who figured out which one it is..."

"Yeah, that's great!"

"And you could move in, really get to know the place."

"Where, like somewhere close? I could move out to Hedfield."

"No, too big, too close. Pick somewhere a little further."

"Wait, I don't want to move."

"I don't see how you ahve a choice. You can't go anywhere local."

"I could just research the place." I was fumbling, trying to stay home. home, where my friends were. Where my girlfriend was. I didn't want ot leave it. "That would work."

"No, it wouldn'.t It works out for you in a couple of ways. Makes you look like a travelling man, kindof a "Where's Waldo" thing going on too. It's an adventure. It's something that readers will altch onto, get rabid about. A contest. It all works out so well. I want you to pick a city and live there for a month, report back here."

"Listen..."

"You can talk to me some more tomorrow about it. I need to think about it a little, and I'm sure you do too."

Fuck.


+ + + + +

Next Day.

Hecould have at least given me a weekend. Two days of reedom before I come up with some last second solution. I had a night. A sleepless one. I wandered the apartment with my socks on. Amber kept wakign up and calling me back to bed. I'd come back, lay there for a minute, and get back up.

Around 4 A.M., I found myself on the internet. I was browsing through, looking for some sort of informational light for my tunnel. I looked into the online reviews of my article. I looked at a couple of messageboards that made sparse mentionof it in reference to something else. I finally managed to find a messageboard thread totally devoted to the subject of the location of elusive "Hogtown". As I read over peoples' theories and discussions of the inane topic, I began to realize what Seitz was saying the day before. There was a lady from Oklahoma that claimed that the barber shop I dredged up from an old Western was from her town. A particular Car repair place reminded a lady from North Carolina of a place she remembered as a kid. Some guy from Maine said that he knew my informant personally, and had conversations with him about the stories. he further claimed to know the next installment. I was tempted to write it jsut as he said, if only to totally fuck with him.

But as I sat there and read literally dozens of stories about people claiming to be the heirs to my second-hand and second-rate story, I began to understand what they were looking for: Identity. These people wanted desperately to legitemize their childhood memories of living in a small town, and they were stretchingto try to make it real. I never needed to write about a real town.

But someone felt cheated. Someone out there went through the trouble of investigating me, finding me out, and discrediting me. For our damn articles. It smacked of the publishing industry. "Vigor" was out for blood, and they were working with the "Rising Star" to take me down. Nothing personal. Just a forty-year old vendetta. I was just a lackey who got caught, and I'd make a nice tool to put a hole in the ship that was the "Cold Creek" magazine.

I wasn't going to let them. All of the sudden, I felt embattled. And emboldened as a result. If it was war they wanted, it was war they'd get.

I broke out an old atlas and spent the rest of the night poring over it.


+ + + + + +

Seitz met me early. First thing, really. My first cup of coffee was still cooling in m yhand when he stopped by and asked me how things were going.

"I've got somethign figured out." I said. I might have slurred it. I'd only managed two hours of sleep.

"Well, tell me about it." He'd folded his arms in that authoritative way, and leaned back against he wall opposite my humble cubicle. He reminded me of his daughter for a second there, all full of himself and in charge. Struck me as very odd- he was bald and very masculine, and his daughter was very pretty yet still had some of his features. I saved a cringe for later.

"Well, I found a town... Everything's getting set up. I move down there, live there for a while and write about local stuff. Basically a glorified local opinion columnist, really. It'll be like a vacation."

"A good way to look at it."

"I'll just need some money. I mean, I'm not gonna go broke over this."

"I wouldn't expect you to. But we don't have mmuch of a travel budget right now. Ron's covering that East Asia thing, and Trisha's in Amsterdam doing that hash bar expose." He pondered for a minute. "I looked over it last night, and we can afford to give you five hundred a week for expenses."

Pennyroyal

I sighed. It wasn't going to be club med, but at least I was getting paid enough to get through. My mind was already charging through ways to save money. I could stay in someone's house. I could live off of groceries. There was a time a couple of years back when I thought of five hundred a week as being a king's ransom. These days it felt more meager. Seitz knew that. "I can do that. I was thinking of taking off next Monday."

Seitz laughed. "let's see, that gives you two days to sit around the office, a weekend to get drunk, and next week you don't ahve to come back here. Sounds too easy. I want you down there by Friday." He looked a little puzzled. "Where's the town? Did you find one?"



+ + + + + + +


So I ended up taking the drive south. Get to I-65, follow it on to Kentucky, then further south to Serena, take the exit and follow the road straight, taking no turns until you get right there. Haggerin. Simple.

I was awake that night, reading over the list of towns that people thought were Hogtown. And it stuck out. Turns out there were some people who even called it that. Hogtown. I'm a lucky son of a bitch. It's close, too. I was able to make the drive in under five hours, and if I needed to cme back home for anything, I'd be able to. I was planning on coming back the next weekend. Amber was stuck back at home. They'd lost some of their night shift, so she was having to work nights to cover and couldn't take any time off. She'd never be able to take more than two or three days at a stretch, though. She kept a hectic schedule. No, I'd end up driving back, spending the night with her and driving down south again.

There's a strange character to things as you drive south through Illinois. Like I mentioned earlier, I grew up in Peoria, which has its own sort of character. After I'd been on the road for an hour or so, it struck me. Those John Hughes movies! My buddies and I always thought Shermer Illinois, the setting of John Hughes movies, was really in Peoria. Then Ferris Beuler came out, and they end up in downtown Chicago. found out later that it was supposed to be a suburb of Chicago, and that John Hughes' neighborhood growing up, Northbrook, was originally called Shermerville. I shit you not, it's true. I found out from a film geek years later.

I felt a little better about my deception. Hogtown was an allegory for my childhood shenanigans in Peoria. There was corn there. I'm sure there were farmers. I've never really been to a farm, but I've seen plenty. In fact, as I drove across the northern Illinois Flatlands, I could see nothing but. I felt a little better.

But not really. My stories had been cornpone amalgamations of elements from Cracker Barrel and Hee-Haw. I'd drawn from the most cliched and trite sources to produce what could best be termed hackery of the foulest type. And I'd repeated it. It might ahve been a forgiveable sin as filler during a slow month, but I'd made it into a cash cow. I didn't even understand the meaning of the term cash cow, really. Where did it come from? Fuck, I knew as little as a person probably could about country life. I mean, I'm no dunce. I know better than to think that they didn't wear shoes or that they didn't have plumbing or electricity. Hell, I imagine that if I lived out there, I'd be addicted to movies, TV, the internet. Anything to connect with humanity.

And I think that was it. The thing I'd been fearing since I'd gotten ready to leave. Isolation. Going out into the fringes of civilization without contacts or friends, and trying to get by. More than that, trying to salvage my career. And it wasn't like I'd have any problems focusing. What else would I have to do while I was there? I imagined myself holed up in a cabin, writing reams and reams of text, with no outside contact or interaction to distract me.

My Cell chirped. I fumbled with my jacket pocket while I found it. FUCK! missed them. They were leaving me a message on my phone and I was powerless to stop it.

Seconds later, I pulled into an old Citgo. I thought there weren't Citgo's anymore, but here was living proof that they still existed. Looking over, I doubted the pumps worked. I flipped my phone on and went through the seeming half hour of useless voice menus. Eventually, I found the message. It was annoyingly long.

"Hey, Steve! (I went by Steve. I hadn't told you that? Silly me.) It's Ted. I called ahead for you and found out about your hotel situation. Looks like it's closed due to fire. You might want to look into somewhere else to stay. I'll call you back in a minute, I'm gonna look here and see what I can find out for you. Good luck!"

He didn't make mention of the office party I was going to miss, or the game. Fuck them, all snug and comfortable in their magazine. I was the warrior. Out here walking the journalistic beat.

A muffled voice: "You alright?"

I nearly pissed myself. I turned, and there before me was a seventy-years olf gas station attendant in a grey jumpsuit with a rag in his pocket. he was lighting a cigarette. I politely rolled down the window.

"Heh, didn't mean to scare ya." He spoke around his cigarette like it belonged there.

"Oh, I'm fine. Just answering a call." I gestured with my cell phone.

"Yeah." He turned and wandered off without any sort of pleasantry. I'd probably pissed him off. Fucking crazy ass redneck.

I fired up the engine and pulle back out onto the highway. I'd travelled another four hours before I got to Kentucky. I'd always looked at the Ohio as being the cutoff point between civilization and anarchy. If you wanted to find inbred, shotgun-toting, NASCAR loving motherfuckers riding around in trucks with mullets, you would be wise to look below the Mason-Dixon. That's not to say there weren't rednecks in Chicago. There were, and it was a bitch. But they wer elike an enclave. Immigrants from the redneck homeland. I was about to cross the shore between my world and theirs, and I was going to have to deal with it. You have to understand my position on this. Growing up in a kind of depot town, I wanted nothing more than to escape to a larger city. Some place with culture, theater, intelligence. Chicago, to my young eye, looked to be that place. Now that I'm a little older, I understand things a little better. Chicago's place on the world scale isn't the same as the role I'd assigned it when I was a kid. Still, it suited me.

I crossed the border. The Ohio. One straight mile of water, crossed by a steel bridge. Louisville loomed before me. A couple of small towers, a parody of Chicago. People here thought it was a big city, no doubt. It had all the trappings of an overgrown southern proto-city wound up in the trappings of its own superiority. It took me less than a half hour to get through Louisville and back out into the sticks. Big hills, almost mountains, loomed on either side of me, the road sometimes cut directly into the rock. You'd drive for a mile or so sometimes with sheer rock cliffs on either side, cut from the hill with dynamite and bulldozers. Lots of forest, lots of little farmhouses and barns. By this point, my mentality had changed a little. I wanted to be accepting. I wanted to learn what it was like to look at the world from the point of view of someone from here. But in all honesty, it just bored me. I'd seen landscapes eerily similar in Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and pretty much wherever I went within a thousand miles of here. All the same. I was lucky that I got to cross the state along its short axis. I got to my destination qucikly enough. The Serena exit. Serena was a town only by loose definition. Hardly ten houses, a gas station, and an exit ramp. I turned right and headed out, making no stops, taking to turns. I'd gone about thirty miles before I began to question what was going on. A doubt had planted itself in my mind. I didn't really have amap with me, so I could have taken the wrong turn off the highway. I ran across a town called Lynchburg, and my suspicions were proven true when the road I was on ended. I swore a bit and found a gas station. The guy working there told me I'd probably gone the wrong way, since he didn't know of a town called Haggerin anywhere near, though he'd heard of it before.

It was that kind of misdirection and homogenaety that would work to my advantage. Places like Haggerin were safely anonymous. I worried less about being found out and more about finding material to keep writing my column.

I finally made it, late in the afternoon. By the time I arrived, I was glad to get out and stretch my legs.I'd found myself in a square. There were a variety of ships around, mostly antique stores, a drug store, and lawyers offices. I decided to walk around a little, and went in one of the antique stores. I was greeted by an old woman who smelled like clean old women do. She was super nice, and showed me around and took me upstairs.

"Where are you from?"

"Peoria, Illinois."

"Well, you came a long way. Did you come to see the Starsmore museum?"

"Uh, no. What's that?"

"Oh, well. Jonathan Starsmore was a writer from around the run of the century. You've never heard of him?"

I had. Jonathan Starsmore was credited with being an unsung literary hero of the modern age. His books were released after he died, and he enjoyed a healthy postmortem following. I'd read one of his books back in college...

"Appropriately Complex..."

"That's his most famous one. We get a lot of tourists coming to see his statue."

"He has a statue?"

"Well, yeah. It's right outside, on your left."

I went outside, and sure enough, there he stood. MAde completely of copper and standing about eight feet tall on a pedestal at least that, Starsmore loomed over noonday (lack of) traffic.

Wisp

wow... very long. I will see if I can get to this later, but for now I suggest dividing it up into a few different parts. A long post such as this is very intimidating to a critiquer.