Soft Maniacs: Stories - Softcover

Estep, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476792860 ISBN 13: 9781476792866

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Synopsis

From Maggie Estep, heralded author of Diary of an Emotional Idiot, comes this darkly funny collection of inter-connected stories.
Jody Ray, a young psychiatrist, conceals her own nymphomania -- and a penchant for stiletto boots -- behind a conservative navy work suit. After Jody meets Rob and moves into his apartment, life for this nice, normal Jewish boy from Chicago will never be the same. Even without the speed she shoots to get through medical school, Jody's sexual and emotional demands would have pushed poor Rob to the suicide attempt that eventually turns him into one of her patients. Like Rob, the other men she meets cannot help but be caught and destroyed in the vortex she creates. Some flee to the relative safety of Jody's old acquaintance, Katie Murphy. Though a foul-mouthed former sex-phone operator, this lion tamer's daughter has come through life hopeful and intact.
Soft Maniacs traces the interwoven lives of these two women as they struggle to make their way in an erratic world they can't quite get a grasp on. Through sharp, vigorous prose, underlaid with a piercing wit, Maggie Estep leads us on a roller coaster tour of the underbelly of their psyches, surprising and delighting us at every turn. At once frightening and hilarious, heartbreaking and hopeful, Soft Maniacs is an unforgettable exploration of how people find one another in an accelerated world.

About this title

About the Author:

Maggie Estep's first novel, Diary of an Emotional Idiot, was published in 1997. She reads and lectures throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe and has made two spoken word CDs. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Spin, Harper's Bazaar, and The Village Voice. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Horses

When my wife dumped me, I quit my job at the box factory, left Cleveland, and wandered for a few months. I didn't like my wife that much anyway. And I hated Cleveland.

At one point I was traveling with this guy Disco Donny. He had metal plates in his head. I'd met him at a flophouse I stayed in one night. We started hitchhiking together. He was pushing fifty. I don't know why he called himself Disco Donny.

Donny and I would find a day's work here and there, and at the end of the day I'd get drunk. Donny said he couldn't drink, though. It reacted badly with the plates in his head.

One day we were in this little town in Kentucky. We stopped in at a soup kitchen. A small, toothless guy eating next to us said we could get work hotwalking racehorses at a nearby farm. I'd had a thing for horses since I was a kid, so right away I was interested. Donny frowned, though. He stared at the toothless guy like this was some sort of trap.

"What's it to you?" Donny asked the little guy. "You get a cut or somethin'?"

The toothless guy stopped gumming his food for a moment and said "Huh?" like he had no idea what Disco Donny was talking about. And I'm sure he didn't.

When Donny and I left the soup kitchen, I told him I really wanted to go work with the horses. Donny frowned. He had unnaturally bright blue eyes that got black when he tried to think too hard.

"Yeah, okay, Leon," he said after a while. "If you want to." For some reason, Donny always called me Leon even though I kept telling him it was Leo, no n.

We walked to the farm the toothless guy had told us about. When we got there, Donny said I ought to hang back and he'd go find whoever was in charge. I guess I was pretty scraggly looking, and Disco Donny had this image of himself as really presentable even though he was anything but.

While Donny went to try and get us jobs, I stood there looking into the field where dozens of thoroughbreds were grazing, their coats shining like new dimes. One of them, a chestnut colt with white stockings, looked over at me. I made a soft noise in my throat. The colt pinned his ears forward but didn't come any closer. Just looking at him was soothing, though. I grew up in the sticks of Ohio, and whenever things got weird I'd go down the road to McCarthy's farm and ride their draft horses. Now, just the smell of horses can calm me down if I'm feeling strange.

After a few minutes, Donny came back shaking his head. "Nah, kid, we're too late. We gotta show up at four a.m. The guy said try back tomorrow."

I guess I looked as dejected as I felt because Donny socked me playfully on the shoulder and told me to cheer the fuck up, we'd come back the next day. Even when he meant to go easy, Donny could really throw a punch, and so now my shoulder hurt on top of my other complaints, which, after four months' sleeping on benches, army cots, and boxes, were many. I looked over at the chestnut colt once more and then shrugged. I had a feeling we wouldn't make it back there the next day.

Donny and I walked out to the main road, heading back for town. I was dragging my feet and pretty soon Donny decided we ought to hitch a ride. We stopped walking and stuck our thumbs out.

A girl in a Buick convertible pulled over and right away I was suspicious. I'd never known a woman alone to pick up two scraggly males. But Donny just hopped right in. So I did too.

"Where you guys headed?" the girl asked us, and Donny told her we just wanted to go back to town.

This seemed to disappoint her, and at this point I noticed something was wrong with her face, like it didn't sit right on her bones. But she was wearing a short skirt and her legs were long and creamy so I stopped looking at her face and thought of how nice it would be if she suddenly veered off onto some dirt road and ordered me to go down on her. Donny could just sit there staring into space. He wouldn't mind.

Just as I thought this, Donny suddenly spoke up. "Look, a circus," he said loudly, pointing out a circus set up there by the side of the road. I looked over and sure enough, there were a bunch of striped tents, yellow and white but the yellow all faded. I could see a train of elephants marching along, making little clouds of dust rise up.

"Stop the car," Donny told the girl. She didn't seem to hear him, though. She just kept driving.

"Pull over NOW," Disco Donny shouted. The girl slammed on the brakes and her face started twitching as Disco Donny got out.

"Leon, come, we're going to the circus," he said to me. The girl's twitching face was making me more nervous than Donny was, so I got out and followed him.

It was midmorning now and the circus people seemed to be just waking up. A fat lady emerged from a trailer. She was so huge that the trailer creaked with relief when she stepped out. She stood there for a second, looking around, then started jogging in place, her flesh slapping itself in protest. Nearby, some inbred-looking redneck guys were setting up a table of food as a burly man led an elephant by.

"I love the circus," Donny said. I shrugged. I wasn't that big on the circus. But it was nice to see Donny enthused like this.

We wandered around for about twenty minutes until a guy in a cowboy hat asked if he could help us with something.

"We're looking for work," Donny told the guy.

"That so?" the guy said, looking me and Donny up and down.

As it happened, the circus had a high turnover and the guy in the cowboy hat was hard-up for help. He hired us as ticket takers for the day, installing us on two stools by the main entrance and telling us we'd better not do anything stupid. When the guy had left, Donny started waxing rhapsodic about the circus. How it was all that was left that reminded him of the good ol' days. I wasn't sure what good ol' days, since from what I'd heard of Donny's past, there were only brief moments of good between long streaks of rotten luck. But Donny was happy. "This is great," he kept saying, rocking back and forth on his stool as people started coming in and handing us their tickets.

At one point Donny got beer from somewhere. I made a comment since he'd told me he couldn't drink -- and I could have used a beer myself.

"Shut up, Leon," he said. So I did.

I don't know if it was the metal plates in his head or what, but a couple of beers did a number on Donny. He started rocking back and forth with increasing velocity, laughing this crazy, out-of-control laugh, showing teeth -- and he didn't have good teeth. People were repelled over handing their tickets to us and eventually the guy who'd hired us came and fired Donny.

Donny got so angry he started throwing things. Change out of his pockets. Empty popcorn containers from the ground. The stools we'd been sitting on. There was an off-duty cop nearby and he got involved, whipping out handcuffs and telling Donny he'd better calm down. When Donny failed to settle, a few circus guys and the cop got behind him and snapped the handcuffs on. I tried to tell the cop Donny was a nice guy, he just had metal plates in his head. The cop just sneered at me, though, so I walked away. I figured Disco Donny probably wouldn't even notice I wasn't around anymore.

When they'd hauled Donny off, the guy who'd hired us came up to me. He was a pear-shaped guy with gaps between his teeth and a nose like a potato.

"What you doin' hangin' out with that character, son?" he asked me. I shrugged. He seemed to think I was a kid, even though I'd just turned twenty-five. Before I'd married Mickie and we'd moved to Cleveland, I'd lived in the sticks all my life, and I guess it made me look young.

The guy, whose name was Petey, brought me into the trailer he lived in with Gus, the elephant trainer. Gus was a lanky redheaded guy who looked dumber than a stamp until you saw his eyes. Then you noticed there was something in there. Gus fried up some hamburgers, and him and Petey shot the shit, grumbling about the murky weather and whatnot. I didn't say much but I was glad to be fed. A little later, Petey told me I could sleep in a spare stall in the animals' tent. At first, when he led me into the place, I confused the smell of elephants for horses and got excited because, since that afternoon, I'd gotten it into my head I needed to work with horses. But Petey told me there weren't any horses around.

I'd slept in all sorts of places, including a barn, but I'd never shared housing with elephants before. Hearing them foraging was sort of soothing, though. I bedded down on some straw and started thinking about the girl who'd picked me and Donny up. I pictured my hands on her creamy legs, digging into the flesh as I made my way up the short denim skirt she'd had on. I thought about flipping her over and kneading her ass cheeks and maybe entering her like that, from behind. Then I remembered the way her face had twitched, her lip curling up so it almost touched her nose. That put a damper on things. So I thought of my wife, Mickie, for a minute. She was always bossy sexually. Like I had to just lie there, like a rag doll, and let her do stuff to me. Which was okay for a while. Then she became bossy over everything else too. It got to where she'd go out all night and come back drunk, with her clothes fucked up, and wouldn't tell me where she'd been. But she would still want me to take off my clothes and lie there and let her do stuff. And I'd be there on my back with her mouth on parts of me and all I could do was wonder where she'd been all night. But I hadn't made a huge fuss about it. I figured she'd outgrow all that. Then, of course, she dumped me. Thinking about it depressed the hell out of me and I fell asleep.

In the morning, Petey set me to work helping Gus clean up after the elephants. Gus didn't say much and was fairly nice to work for. We fed the elephants, then led them into an outdoor pen while we mucked crap out of their stalls. Afterward Gus had a training session with the elephants and Petey got me doing odd jobs. Petey was both the manager and the handyman of the circus. Every few days, when the circus moved to a new town, something invariably went wrong and Petey had to take care of it. We fixed the toilet in the acrobats' trailer. We helped the roadies take knots out of a big rope that some disgruntled worker had tied up out of spite. We drove into town to get meat for the lions.

By afternoon everyone was getting ready for showtime. There were people walking around in clown suits and leotards, Gus was putting saddles on the elephants, the dog trainer was schooling his dogs. Pretty soon the crowds started coming, mostly poor families -- kids in Kmart clothes, fleshy tired mothers, some of them with husbands in tow, blue-collar guys who wanted to be home watching the game. Nobody looked very happy. It seemed like coming to the circus was just something they were doing out of a sense of obligation, some vague historical recall of when circuses were the only entertainment there was. It was all sort of depressing, but in a nice way.

Once the show started up, Petey brought me in his trailer and offered me a beer. We sat there mostly silent, then he told me I could keep hanging around when the circus moved to the next town. I was pretty pleased.

Over the next few days I guess I made myself fairly useful. When we moved on into Lexington, one of the clowns got fired, so I was promoted. Being a clown had never been on my list of things to do, but a promotion is a promotion, so I went along with it.

The head clown, Remo, outfitted me with a costume: a nose, shoes, the whole bit. The first time I caught sight of myself in the mirror all kitted up like that, I just busted out laughing. I looked like some character out of a weird porno movie or a scary children's story. Like any minute I was gonna sprout an axe or a raging hard-on and go wreak clown havoc. Remo was standing right there and didn't understand why I was laughing so hard. To him there wasn't anything funny about being a clown.

Once I was outfitted, Remo and his wife, Fat Judy, showed me the basic routine: I had to ride in on an elephant, pretend to fall off, then do some somersaults. Remo and Fat Judy did most of the act. I was just there to thicken out the ranks.

The first night went fine. I rode in on Marty, the big Indian elephant. I fell off and did some somersaults. I went up into the audience and blew a horn and gave kids balloons. It beat working at the box factory.

Remo and Fat Judy gave me a tiny room of my own in their trailer, but I didn't get to spend much time there. When I wasn't working on new clown routines, I had to help out with the elephants. I didn't mind, though. The elephants reminded me of horses. They smelled different and didn't move a fraction as gracefully, but they were soothing all the same.

Things went along okay. Every two or three days we'd go to a new town. Sometimes there were circus groupies who'd linger after the show. They were the kind of girls who wanted to be rock band groupies, only no rock bands ever came through the dink towns we set up in, so these girls made do with the likes of us.

One night after the show, I hadn't even taken my clown outfit off when this Harley-looking chick came on to me. She was about four eleven, with tattoos and frizzy hair. She wasn't hideous. She came up and said, "Can I buy you a beer, dude?"

I didn't like being called "dude," so I said no and walked off.

I was passing by the lion tamer's trailer when I saw this girl I'd never seen before emerge. She was small, with dirty-blonde hair that hung in her face. The moment I laid eyes on her I started having visions of her thighs wrapped around my head. Of course, she didn't even notice me. She walked off toward where the roadies were taking down the main tent. And I just stood there, this guy in a clown costume, gawking at her and thinking lewd thoughts. But she was probably used to that.

The next day I pestered Remo and Fat Judy, asking them questions about the girl. They didn't know much but told me she was the lion tamer's daughter and she wasn't eighteen yet.

After that I started walking by the lion tamer's trailer about fifty times a day until finally, one night, Katie emerged. Her eyes were puffy and her hair was in nests like she'd been sleeping. All I could think was how I couldn't wait for her to be sleeping next to me.

I'd taken the clown costume off after the show and I was in jeans now. I walked over to where she was sitting in front of the trailer.

"Hi," I said.

"Who are you?" she said, squinting at me.

"The new clown."

"Oh."

"You wanna ride an elephant?"

She frowned but didn't say anything. She lit a cigarette.

"You're gonna hurt your little lungs," I said, staring at her chest.

"My lungs aren't that little," she said. "Where'd they find you, anyway?"

"What?"

"When'd you start working here?"

"Last week. In Kentucky," I told her. She was upsetting me. I felt like she could see inside my head, how I'd already mentally undressed her. My big lungs pressing against her little lungs.

"So you want me to ride an elephant, huh?" she mused, blowing a smoke ring. The way she said it, I instantly pictured her naked on the elephant.

And she might as well have been. She got on wearing only her cutoffs and a halter top. I figured that, being around the circus, she must have known about the fungus on the elephant skin, how you have to wear long pants or put a saddle on the elephant lest their skin fungus get on you and cause rashes. But I didn't say anything until after she'd dismounted. Then I mentioned she'...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476792860
• ISBN 13: 9781476792866
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224