You Want More Read online

  YOU WANT MORE

  ALSO BY GEORGE SINGLETON

  Staff Picks

  Calloustown

  Between Wrecks

  Stay Decorum

  Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds:

  Indispensible Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers

  Workshirts for Madmen

  Drowning in Gruel

  Novel

  Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood

  The Half-Mammals of Dixie

  These People are Us: Stories

  Copyright © 2020 George Singleton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  BOOK DESIGN: Meg Reid

  FRONT COVER: © Chris Strickland / Alamy

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Mark Olenki

  PROOFREADERS: Kalee Lineberger,

  Jacque Lancaster, Kendall Owens

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Singleton, George, 1958- author.

  You want more : selected stories / George Singleton.

  Spartanburg, SC : Hub City Press, [2020] | “With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. These stories bear the influence of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, with its inexorable defeats and small triumphs.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers:

  LCCN 2020029057

  ISBN 9781938235696 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781938235702 (ebook)

  Classification:

  LCC PS3569.I5747 A6 2020

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029057

  Hub City Press gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amazon Literary Partnership, South Carolina Arts Commission, and Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition

  HUB CITY PRESS

  200 Ezell Street

  Spartanburg, SC 29306

  864.577.9349|www.hubcity.org

  In memory of my father, George (1925-1983), and mother,

  Bev (1928-2015)—plus their odd assortment of friends, merchant

  seamen to lawyers—who raised me with outlandish, questionable stories.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword by Tom Franklin

  The Half-Mammals of Dixie

  A Man with My Number

  This Itches, Y’all

  Four-Way Stop

  John Cheever, Rest in Peace

  Caulk

  When Children Count

  Fresh Meat on Wheels

  Lickers

  Director’s Cut

  Probate

  Show-and-Tell

  The Novels of Raymond Carver

  Outlaw Head and Tail

  I Could’ve Told You If You Hadn’t Asked

  How to Collect Fishing Lures

  Columbarium

  Vaccination

  Staff Picks

  Traditional Development

  Hex Keys

  Unemployment

  How Are We Going to Lose This One?

  Perfect Attendance

  The Opposite of Zero

  Embarrassment

  Which Rocks We Choose

  Even Curs Hate Fruitcake

  Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award

  What Could’ve Been?

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  by Tom Franklin

  GEORGE SINGLETON CAN MAKE CAULK FUNNY. A YARDSTICK. Goody’s Headache Powders. He can find humor in anything, hex keys, a rock, a rock pit, the metal numbers you put on your mailbox… And don’t even get me started on fishing lures.

  In person, George’s got these gleaming eyes, and he usually needs a shave. He has a smoker’s scratchy voice and a cartoon ha-ha-ha of a laugh that he uses a lot. He wears baseball caps. He’s a college professor who plays pranks on his pals. He nabs opossums in his yard at night and carries them around, for fun, then lets them go. He catches rat snakes and posts Facebook pictures of himself holding the snake, his forearm bloody from where it bit him. He’s had up to 11 dogs at once, mostly rescue animals, and lots of cats. He lives with a brilliant visual artist, Glenda Guion, in a rural, rambling house, and he doesn’t care if your youngest son pees on the fence by his pool.

  And also? He’s a goddamn mad genius at writing stories. This book, page by page, is one of the funniest you’ll ever read. I kept laughing and quoting lines to my wife and 14-year-old son, who asked if he could read the book next. “Absolutely,” I said. “And remember when your brother peed on his fence?”

  George’s stories are filled with rocky marriages, lovelorn fathers, young boys who do things like screw other young boys in the armpits using Noxema Skin Cream. The stories are filled with dogs, too, dogs being vaccinated, being euthanized, even a dog that heals by licking. You’ll also find herein some of the most hilarious character names in literature—Owe Posey, Libby Belcher, Stonewall Harrell, Tapeworm Johnson (a dog)—and even a story where a young teacher is fired when she has her class sing the “Name Game” (“Mendal, Mendal bo bendal banana fanna fo fendal, etc.”), not considering that her class “included two Chucks, a boy named Lucky, another named Tucker, and an unfortunate girl—unless later on in life she had gathered work in a Nevada brothel—whose parents tabbed her Bucky.”

  This all takes place in George’s native South Carolina, in the fictional towns of Forty-Five, Calloustown and Gruel, towns populated with broken, confused, abandoned, lonely people who’re looking for some connection to somebody else. A few try to escape their surroundings but most fail to achieve what Charles Portis calls “escape velocity.” Unlike many other Southern characters, though, these people are often educated—for all the good it does them in Calloustown. It’s as if Binx Bolling got misplaced among the Snopses, and was funnier. George’s people sometimes teach college, they quote Marx and Kierkegaard, they strive for low-residency graduate degrees (a master’s in Southern Studies at the Ole Miss-Taylor campus). They try to apply theories and logic to a place like Gruel, for all the good that does.

  You can usually describe the premise of a George Singleton story in one sentence: A man’s entire life is colored by his having a single line of dialogue (“This itches, y’all”) in a local documentary about head lice. A recent high school graduate is sent to write articles about places not to visit for a travel guide called Wish You Weren’t Here. A college instructor scams his school by teaching a class called “The Novels of Raymond Carver” (Carver never wrote a novel). So the stories are funny, first, because they’re based on funny ideas.

  Yet they’re hilarious on the micro-level, too. One of my many favorites in here is “Show-and-Tell.” A father, abandoned by his wife, tr
ies to re-woo his old high school sweetheart, now his young son’s teacher, by making the boy take elaborate (and fake) love memorabilia to show-and-tell each week—for example, a “long-lost love letter from famed lovers Heloise and Peter Abelard.” The aforementioned letter is in English, not French, as the nonplussed teacher points out, and “handwritten on lined and hole-punched Blue Horse filler paper.” Sentence by sentence, nobody is funnier.

  And yet, no matter how absurd these stories can be, no matter how hard you laugh, you can’t escape the sadness augered into their architecture. Like his literary uncle, Lewis Nordan, and his literary cousin, Jack Pendarvis, George is brilliant at teetering us on that singing wire between joy and grief.

  And speaking of grief, what happens after you’ve read this whole book, all thirty stories? What happens when withdrawal begins? Not to worry! You can read the rest of George’s fiction—a total of almost ninety more short stories in eight collections! Also, you can find his two novels, Novel: A Novel and Workshirts for Madmen (an excerpt of which, “Director’s Cut,” appears in this volume).

  Yes, George Singleton is a mad genius. Southern Literature’s trickster, its rascal, catching its opossums and booby-trapping its woods and towns to find humor in his characters’ tragedy and tragedy in their humor, reminding us that laughter might not be able to save us, but, goddamn, it can help.

  SELECTED STORIES OF GEORGE SINGLETON

  THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE

  I TOOK A FOLDING CHAIR IN THE BACK OF THE RAMADA INN’S Azalea Room without looking for any of my coworkers. I’d parked next to the guest speaker’s car, I figured—the vanity tag read MOTIV8R—but restrained myself from slicing the goddamn evolved Lincoln Continental, headlight to atrophied fin, with my own car key. My boss had paid to have his entire six-person southeastern sales force attend, in hopes that we would pick up pointers on how to talk more seafood restaurants into setting up giant aquariums in their dining areas, stocked with everything from horseshoe crabs to sand sharks, cleaned and maintained by trained and licensed aquatic technicians who spent most hours thinking up ways to kill salesmen like me so they could travel from Virginia to Mississippi, lolling around places like Whitey’s Crab Shack, the Splashing Mermaid, and Grouper Therapy. I sat down and stripped the back of my name tag. I placed it askew over the Salty’s Showfish logo on my left breast pocket. Then I looked over at the woman seated next to me, a thirty-year-old wearing a black-and-silver skirt that provided her lap with only a cocktail-napkin-sized piece of cloth. She crossed her right leg over toward me in such a way that created a tunnel to look into. I thought, This ain’t going to be bad at all.

  Then I looked up to see that her face had a giant tic-tac-toe pattern carved into it.

  A man from the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce went to the podium and said, “We want to welcome all of you to this workshop. As you can see from the agenda, after Mooney Gray speaks we’ll break for lunch, then reconvene in smaller groups to brainstorm. Also, as you can see in your packet, we have more than thirty businesses represented, and y’all know that it only takes two companies to get a little networking done, so there’s no telling what can happen here. Especially—” this guy held up his hand as if holding a champagne glass shaking with plutonium “—once y’all discover the two complimentary drink tickets stapled to the room-service menu.”

  I didn’t notice how everyone in the audience clapped or hooted, really. I focused on the podium but peripherally saw the woman’s scars. Her nose was in the center space, her eyes to the top left and right corners. The woman’s mouth took up the entire bottom middle space but spilled over to the lower corners of the game.

  When I dropped my pen by accident, I pretended it hadn’t happened. But the woman bent down, tapped my knee, and said, “Here you go.”

  “I’m sorry. Thanks. I’m truly sorry,” I said.

  “My name’s Lorene.” She swiveled her torso a quarter turn and touched her name tag. I could only look at her face and wonder what had happened. The scars were deep, wide, and only a touch off being purple. It looked as though she had been placed belly down on a table saw set to cut grooves a half-inch deep. I tried not to think of those old silent movies wherein the hog-tied heroine barely gets saved at the sawmill.

  I took off my name tag completely and said, “I’m Drew Gaston.” I couldn’t get the tag to stick on my shirt again. “I work for Salty’s Showfish.”

  Mooney Gray came out wearing a blue suit. He took off his coat. He made a big point of ripping off the necktie, as if he didn’t trust it. He ripped off his pinstriped blue dress shirt in a way that made buttons fly off onto people seated in the front row. Mooney Gray now stood before the crowd of salespeople in need of motivation wearing his pants and a T-shirt that—from his right to left—had a picture of Moe Howard’s face, then a lowercase letter t that looked like a cross, and finally Darth Vader’s helmeted head.

  Lorene said, “I’ve seen this guy before. It gets worse.”

  I tried to remember if most children started in a corner box or right in the middle when they played tic-tac-toe.

  “I want to start off this morning by telling y’all a little story about two brothers. One was the ultimate optimist, and the other would take bets with complete strangers that the sun wouldn’t rise the next morning. You know this second old boy, I’m sure. They had the same mother and father, who fed them the same food, and enrolled them in the same schools, and provided for them the best they could. One turned out eternally optimistic, and the other damned toward pessimism.”

  I thought, This is easy. Cain and Abel. If he asks us if we know who he’s talking about, and if I were the kind of man who yelled out answers, I’d yell out Cain and Abel.

  Lorene bent over with her pound-sign face and whispered, “If he asks who he’s talking about, don’t yell out Cain and Abel.”

  I nodded. I tried to stick my goddamn name tag to my pants leg and wished that I’d gotten coffee so that I’d have an excuse to throw away a Styrofoam cup, or get a refill, or feign scalding myself.

  Mooney Gray held one hand up to quiet the crowd of salespeople, all ready to yell out Cain and Abel. “One an optimist, and one a pessimist. Well, these old boys liked to go fishing together, you see. The pessimist would just throw his hook in the water without any bait or anything. He’d say to his brother, ‘I ain’t gone catch nothing noways.’ And then he’d stand there on the bank watching his brother bring in fish after fish off his wormy barb, you know. Bream. Shellcrackers. Sunfish. Cats. Crappies.”

  Lorene scratched her chin. She said to me, “You’re in the fish business. Which one would you hire?”

  I said, “Look at my leg,” and pulled my pants up to the knee. I showed Lorene a birthmark the size of a small pancake. A woman on the other side of her leaned over and looked, too. I said, “Sometimes this itches, y’all, really bad. I don’t know why.”

  Mooney Gray walked from one side of the foot-high stage to the other. He looked at the ceiling. “The pessimist brother never said a word until, one day, the optimist caught a fish so big that it doubled his rod in half. He pulled and reeled, and pulled some more. He’d snagged a grass carp somehow. Finally the fish freed itself, causing the hook to fly back out of the water at a speed so fast not even Superman could’ve detected what flew toward the optimist brother’s face. That hook ended up embedding itself into this old boy’s right eyeball, and it blinded him completely. Soon thereafter it got a serious infection, and the doctor had to take his eyeball out with a spoon.”

  I put my pants leg back down. I didn’t look at my seatmate but thought about how the perfect nine squares on her face resembled the shell of a box turtle. Then I could only think about how cruel this motivational speaker was to tell a story with such a maimed woman in the audience. I knew for certain that Mooney Gray saw Lorene in the audience—that’s what motivational speakers did best, wasn’t it? They noticed faces and memorized names. I said out loud, “I think I’m in the wrong place.” I leaned to stan
d up, but Lorene turned my way, uncrossed her legs, and kept them apart as if she practiced holding a kickball between her thighs.

  Mooney Gray said, “The pessimist brother said one thing. He looked at his brother in the hospital room and said, ‘You can buy fish in a market these days, buddy.’ So there you go.”

  Some people clapped. Once they began clapping, everyone else outside of Lorene and me nodded or laughed.

  I looked at Lorene and said, “I didn’t get that story. Did I miss something?” I figured my mind had wandered up her dress or whatever.

  Lorene said, “You don’t have to show me all of your inadequacies. Don’t think you have to show all of your scars and blemishes. There’s no way you’ll catch up, dearie.”

  I picked one eye and focused. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m trying not to look up your dress. I’m that way.”

  Mooney Gray yelled out, “I see all of y’all nodding your heads and acting like you know what I’m talking about, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you is the worst thing about your salesmanship. That story I just told made no sense. But y’all didn’t want to look stupid. Here’s rule number one: If you’re lost while listening to a client, ask for a road map as soon as possible.”

  I was about to continue my apology for staring at Lorene’s disfigurement, but she raised her hand and said, “Mr. Gray, this man here didn’t have a clue as to what you were talking about. He didn’t get it.” She held her left hand up, her index finger down toward my scalp. When the rest of the seminar-goers turned around, though, I saw how they could only stare at mangled Lorene.

  I KNEW THE rudiments of a filtration system better than anyone in America. I talked to prospective clients about how fish defecated in their own environment and couldn’t live long if no one came around to clean out the tank. That’s not what sold the product and services, of course. I had statistics concerning restaurants and bars without aquariums and the same establishments’ grosses after installing walls of glass, water, and sea bass. I provided legitimate telephone numbers for people to call in case they didn’t believe my claims. More often than not I dealt with ex-surfers, ex-Northerners, ex-husbands. I didn’t see many switchblade victims.