'8 Permutations on the Electric Screwdriver of Power': an homage

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This weekend I went to DC with a bunch of Featherproof Books Mini Books tucked into my notebook. I had printed them out and folded them by the directions. I read maybe a dozen of them, but I’m going to read a lot more and then make a really great blog post about them all at once.

In the mean time, I really liked two in particular. This post concerns one of those, “Eight Permutations on the Binoculars of Power.” You should go read it before you get any further in this post. It’s eight stories, divided in half, so that you read the first half of the eighth story first and the last half of the eighth story last. You read the first half of the seventh story second, and the last half second to last. And so on. Got it? The first story is in the middle. You read the first half and then the second half… no gap.

It’s a gimmick. I usually hate gimmicks. I liked this set of stories, though. The gimmick also plays with your memory a little bit. You have to remember how the first half ended when you get to each second half, and of course it gets progressively harder (or at least further off) as you reach the end.

So I decided to steal the gimmick. That’s why I’m calling this an homage. I mean, it’s not really stealing. The gimmick is more of a form, I think. They could come to call it “a messinger” someday like they call certain poems “sonnets” and “villanelles.” Anyway, the story seemed to have one other rule. In Jonathan Messinger’s “Eight Permutations…”, all the stories had binoculars in them.

So, in my homage to this gimmick, all eight of mine have an electric screwdriver.

If other writers see this, I think they should do one, too (and link back to mine and Messinger’s on your own sites — even if it is MySpace). Only, you probably want to use a different object. Screwdrivers and binoculars are pretty played at this point.

“8 Permutations on the Electric Screwdriver of Power”: an homage”

Eight

O’Shaughnessy the Regular was helping Sacramento Ted build a new private room up in the back of Lucky Duck Chinese Restaurant. No one was moving anything worth driving anywhere in all of Jersey, on account of the bad economy, so O’Shaughnessy said he could help Sacramento Ted set up a new meeting room for taking bets. He’d been working out of the back of Old Roosey’s Dry Cleaners until an ADA started coming there almost every day.

Sacramento Ted had the only drill, and he was making holes in studs on the sawhorses. He was drilling one when O’Shaughnessy said, “I hate hanging dry wall.”

“What’s that?” Sacramento Ted said, pulling his safety glasses off to listen.

“Nothing,” O’Shaugnessy said. He had his first panel of dry-wall sitting on some nails he had put in the studs for the purpose. He wanted to put some lead holes into the studs before screwing them in, so he changed bits on the electric screwdriver.

Seven

Chetopa, Maine had fourteen families, with one carpenter who lived alone. The carpenter never used electric tools because he never had so much work that he needed to get done that quickly. When arthritis started to set in, he toughed it out for a couple more years before relenting. The first tool he bought was an electric screwdriver.

Six

Brian had been very excited to go away to Africa with the Peace Corps. He applied in college two years ago, and he would finally leave home for training this weekend. The morning before he went to Dallas to begin his preparations, his parents made him a big breakfast.

His dad had a gift for him. Brian did not get many gifts in his family, so he really did feel surprised. When he opened it, he found his dad had got him a very expensive electric screwdriver.

Five

Doiley the Dachshund got chased and beaten up by other dogs, all the time. His master, however, always left their garage door open during the day. One afternoon, Doiley went into the garage to escape from two mutts that liked to bat him back and forth between them. He hopped up on a Shop Vac box and onto his master’s workbench.

There, secured to the bench with bolts, his master had a big battery re-charger. Resting in it, recharging, was his master’s professional grade electric screwdriver. Doiley stopped and put his paws up on on the screwdriver to see if the mutts were still coming, and they were just inside the garage. Doiley heard a roar come from the machine he stood on and saw the drill bit on the screwdriver turning.

The mutts ran from that garage yipping as if they had seen a bear.

Four

The last episode of ABC’s not-very-successful, late ’80s show, The Charming’s, never saw broadcast. Expected viewership of the second season finale was so low that they re-ran a Rodney Dangerfield Special instead. In this episode, Prince Charming’s family would have convinced Snow White’s evil stepmother, Lillian, to magic them back to their fairy-tale kingdom. Only, their neighbors, the Millers, would hold them up by throwing a surprise birthday party for the Prince, in which they would give him an electric screwdriver.

Snow White refuses to explain to their friends why she keeps getting so teary over every nice thing the couple does for her and her husband that afternoon.

Three

Anna Mitchell was a very particular sculptor. First of all, she was the only artist she knew who still primarily carved stone. Stone, she found, was considered too old-fashioned by most of her contemporaries. Second, she carved stone, primarily, in the nude inside her studio, inside a building of studios, in North Philadelphia. She always kept her door locked. She liked to work between four a.m. and ten a.m., so that the main sounds she heard were the music of the birds and the tapping of her chisel.

Then, a writer set up a studio next to hers, and she often found him there when she arrived at four AM, up, high on speed, maybe writing but always listening to Seattle Grunge at high volume in his little cubicle. It often didn’t stop till nine or ten a.m.

She tried to talk to the other artists in the building about it, but they all arrived around noon and left at nightfall. None of them had ever even seen him once he moved his stuff in. One morning, she used her electric screwdriver to take the vent off the ductwork between their studios and try to break into his.

Two

Mr. Godfrey could see anyone anywhere simply by concentrating on them. Whatever they were doing at that moment, he could see, as if he were a ghost floating in the room. He was a powerful clairovoyant. His boss, Mr. Alvin Allensland, had asked him to watch the owner of temp agency his firm was suing on behalf of a class of workers that hadn’t been paid at all for transit time to and from jobs way out in the Chicago suburbs.

Mr. Godfrey was shocked to watch the businessmen, in his minds eye, intentionally hit the family cat when it ran alongside his car to go into the garage as he moved his Cadillac in there as well. No one else was home at the time, and the businessman looked non-plussed when he scooped the dead cat up and sat it down on a folding table.

Mr. Godfrey kept watching as the businessman cut boards up in his garage with a table saw and carefully constructed a pine box. When his family came home, he was securing the top of the box for good with his electric screwdriver.

One

Annie Orange Juice was the prettiest homeless woman in St. Louis. Annie had to be on her guard against the other homeless men who tried to force themselves on her. She would only have sex with them if they had something to give her, and she would only do it in an alley during the day. Everyone knew that Annie Orange Juice could yell loud enough for someone to hear. She didn’t have a raspy homeless woman’s voice, either, so someone might even come.

What no one knew, though, was where Annie Orange Juice slept nights. Annie Orange Juice had a way to get into twelve different places around town with the secret electric screwdriver that she never, ever let anyone see.

One

One of Annie Orange Juice’s secret spots was a sewer grate that opened on a ladder that led to an underground channel that led out to the river. The channel was housed in a tunnel with a walkway on either side of it, and there was a nice recess a little ways down where she could sleep. In the summer it didn’t smell so good, but it was all right in the Fall and the Spring.

No one ever saw Annie Orange Juice again after she retreated there one Spring night, drank herself into a deep oblivion with a fifth of gin she’d given three other homeless BJs to have to herself. A big ugly rain came and maxed out the whole storm system after she’d passed out from drink. The water came up and over the channel, into the alcove and lifted the too far gone figure of St. Louis’s prettiest homeless woman off into the river and maybe someday out to sea.

Two

Mr. Godfrey watched in his mind’s eye as the temp agency owner’s wife brought their two daughters into the garage to say hello to him, but they all saw he had an unhappy look on his face. Before they could speak, he told them that he’d found their kitty in the street, hit by some car, maybe an hour before, and left there. He said she was dead and he would bury her.

The daughters started crying. One was five and one was eight. The eldest said, “Can we see her daddy.”

He said he had already sealed up the box.

His eldest said, “But we want to see her,” in a pliant and supplicating voice.

Her father shook his head and stroked her hair. He secured the last screw and his electric screwdriver gave its last little insistent whir before he sat it back to recharge and picked up his shovel.

The five year old screamed, “We wanna say goodbye!”

To which the businessman said, “You do not want to say goodbye to this mangled fucking thing.”

Mr. Allensland found his clairovoyant in the break room sipping green tea a half-hour later. Smiling, Allensland asked Godfrey how the surveillance was coming.

“Mr. Allensland,” Mr. Godfrey said, “I don’t want to tell you your business, but I don’t know if you want to screw around with this guy.”

Three

When Anna got to the vent into the writer’s studio, she realized she wouldn’t be able get through with her screwdriver on this side of the bolts. It looked as if she had gone to all the effort and risk for nothing. Then she saw something move through the grate.

He was still there. He had just turned the music off.

He was walking around naked. Then he sat down in front of one of four laptops and started writing furiously. She couldn’t see all of the room, but there was almost nothing in it. He had a bunch of newspaper clippings about the presidential election taped to the wall, but she couldn’t discern a favored candidate. He had each laptop stands only meant as end tables at best. He rolled around between the laptops on a little rolly stool like her mom used to sit on to do her make-up.

When he got up and started running his fingers through his hair in thought, she could see him much better and started to softly cry a little. He reminded her of the boyfriend she’d loved the most and agreed with least. He was the one she always thought about when she felt lonely. He had had terrible taste in music, too.

Four

Back in the magical kingdom, Lillian would trick the Charmings and lock them in a small room while she prepared a spell that would turn them all into her mindless slaves. It was a darker turn for the final episode, and many people believed it to be Director Howard Murray’s own sort of curse on the network for canceling his favorite project.

In the next part of the un-aired finale, Prince Charming manages to get his family out of the locked room when his son figures out how to turn on the electric screwdriver. Her plan foiled, Lillian is banished to the furthest reaches of the enchanted forest. The final minutes of the episode are spent with Prince Charming proposing ingeniously daft methods for recharging his beloved birthday present from the Millers.

Five

After discovering the button on the electric screwdriver, Doiley did not need to fear other dogs so long as he could get into the garage. One day, his master found Doiley practicing turning his electric screwdriver on in its charger. His master picked Doiley up. “Whatcha’doin’ boy?” he asked, scratching his head. He set him down on the floor of the garage.

Doiley trotted off and his master picked up the electric screwdriver and figured out how to set the child lock.

Six

“Dad,” Brian said, “I’m going to be in a part of Africa that still primarily works by candlelight and sunshine. What am I going to do with an electric screwdriver?”

His dad just smiled like a buddha. Brian looked at his mother, but she had a studied look of neutrality. It might have meant she knew what her husband would say to her son, or it might have meant she hadn’t seen the gift until Brian did.

“Well,” his father said, “It’s not as if anyone signs up for the Peace Corps to do anything useful.”

Seven

By then, the carpenter couldn’t hold the electric screwdriver to use it, though. The town also had an amateur metalsmith, who built him a sort of gauntlet that could crudely hold any of his new electric tools for him. Though it worked awkwardly, with his new electric power, he didn’t work any more slowly than before.

Soon, though, he was cancelling days of work two or three days a week. He had to retire before long. The old carpenter just could not remember to recharge the batteries. People in Chetopa said he just wanted to quit working.

Eight

“Don’t make holes in dry-wall with that,” Sacramento Ted told O’Shaughnessy the Regular. “It’s a screwdriver.

“Works all right,” O’Shaughnessy the Regular said.

“It’s a screwdriver,” Sacramento Ted said again.

O’Shaughnessy used a hand screwdriver for the holes he’d made, out of protest. He heard Sacramento Ted’s drill whine when he hit a bad knot in a board he was working on. He said, “Your wife has been screwing the boss since New Year’s.”

Sacramento Ted lifted his safety glasses to listen again and said, “What’s that?”

“My house,” O’Shaughnessy said, “I’ve got my own drill back at my house.”