clancy steadwell's house - scene report

an autofictional account from the homeland of the Steadwellian corpus

I wake the same time I always do, the same time my son does; or rather, slightly afterward, at the speed of sound from his mewling to my ears. The morning is my shift, my wife will not wake to his crying once the sun comes through the blinds, and come through it does, the angle and velocity of the rays slightly different than the day before, notating the slow changing of the seasons and revealing the room anew every morning, even if we know it remains the same with each waking: half-painted, smelling of dog and scattered with spit-up stained clothes.

My boy smiles at me as I pick him up. This little scenester doesn’t know or care what I write about, whether I’m literary or not, whether writing should be didactic, whether I’m too earnest or cringe, whether thesis-forward fiction belongs on the Internet or whether my prose stylings only work under the umbrella of verisimilitude.

We go downstairs and I think about none of this, only glad to find I remembered to prep a bottle the night before. I warm it and feed him in the rocking chair our parents split the cost of and ordered from Amazon or Wayfair or someplace equally soulless. I have a technique of splaying my Kindle (also soulless) upon my lap as he drinks to get some reading in, but today he kicks it from my lap mid feed, and I can’t recover it as I hold the bottle to his mouth.

He houses the bottle then shits his diaper, with a smell that now comforts me in its regularity. I could change a diaper in my sleep and probably have, although it’s cliche to say so. I put him in his daytime clothes (I can never find the matching shirt-pants combos and so opt for something conveniently reachable instead) and with that he is contented in all matters, having slept, defecated, and eaten, and now only needs to be entertained or stimulated to retain his buoyant demeanor, an increasingly complex challenge.

Taking him outside is a sure bet, though. It’s nearly summer so we sit on the shaded cool of the front porch steps, him upright upon my lap, mouth parted, eyes agape, drool cresting on the preciousness of his pink bottom lip. I imagine the outdoors are still a Sistine Chapel to him, the sky painted with blue, white clouds and the green and brown of tree leaves and branches.

But few others would find my house or its landscape riveting. It’s a 1,500 square foot ranch, a rectangle of no architectural ambition of design, evocative of a storage container. The roof is stained with spots I assume mean it is no longer comprehensive in its defense against the elements. The driveway hasn’t been coated in so long its coloration matches the road. The car upon it is half my age, its paint peeling all over. The lawn is all tuffs of hostas and carpets of juniper and dandelions and all kinds of creeping ivies and other sorts of plants meant to hide the latent dirt, many of which are flowering now under the guise of ‘No-Mow May’, which is supposedly for the bees, but really for me to skip the first month of mowing. All of it, splotchiness derived from the priorities of an aspiring writer with a needful young family.

I converse with my son as we sit, a thing I’d heard was good for a baby’s development, parsed from the million other things you hear are good or bad for a baby. Together we survey the land of our little empire and I say:

“Moments of peace like this are what living is for. They seem insignificant, but that’s most of what life is, I guess: meaningless. If you try and chase life, imbue it with any more meaning than what it’s worth, well, you’re going to be missing out on the peace of it all. Sometimes life is gonna try and take the peace from you. But you gotta hang on to it. Once it’s in your brain, it’s yours to light your little flame with. You can’t let that flame go out. Let it burn forever, son.”

He babbles something appreciative and correct. Really, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Someday he will figure that out.

My wife relieves me with a kiss and grabs him from my arms. I shower, shit, drink my coffee, take the dog out, have some fruit in a bowl (whatever I was hustled out of at the expensive farmer’s market), brush my teeth, read the news on my phone. Will Trump and Iran keep flirting with peace, or will they finally fuck? I read a couple saved short stories on Substack and take some notes on them before my wife hands me the baby again. I forgot she’s gone to hot yoga this morning.

I put him in the crib and bring in my guitar. I’ve played guitar for him every day since he’s been born and I forget how competent I become as a guitarist when I play so often, but it’s a pleasant surprise, a gift to myself from a forgotten past. Songs are forming, chords are discovered, riffs unlocked. He alternates his stare from the fretboard to my picking hand, likes how the tuner heads shine, how the neck casts a shadow on the wall. I can’t tell for sure if he’s entranced by these visual stimulations or by my music, so I choose to believe the latter. Eventually he falls asleep.

It seems like maybe I could sit down to write at this point or at least read, but once at the computer I realize I need to empty the dishwasher; then load the washer; then take out the garbage; then clean the coffeemaker; then water the plants; then change the litterbox. I listen to the Comedy Bang Bang podcast as I hustle around and keep checking the monitor for the baby. By the time I’m done my son has awoken and my wife has returned.

She needs to shower, sweaty from hot yoga as she is, so I take the baby to the living room where thankfully we have a Liverpool game to watch together. We don’t let him look at screens much, but I make an exception for soccer. The constant motion and colors of soccer games enthrall him as much as the outdoors. We sit in front of the screen on the bouncy ball and bounce the whole time. I manage to eat a leftover burger from the previous night’s grilling with him in my lap and get some condiment on his onesie amongst all the bouncing. Liverpool loses because since my son was born they have been cursed, although he only needs feeding and changing at halftime, because somehow he knows this is optimal.

When it’s over my wife takes my son and I get changed to go running because it’s nice out and I know I should, so I do. If I don’t I will get fat and die earlier than needed because I have horrible metabolic syndrome and am at risk for all kinds of heart disease and diabetes. I never really used to be afraid of death. I feared the unknown, of course, but there was nothing the world could offer to make me feel like I was missing out until my son came along. The desperation I feel to stay alive, to see him grow and be there for him, terrifies me into taking care of my mortal body like never before.

I run without ear buds, without distraction, talking to myself. Oftentimes I have a story I try to tell myself as I run. I start from the beginning and tell it until I don’t know where it goes or I can’t remember where it goes, then I start over. A story is like an arrow, and I’m drawing the bow again and again, further and further back, and it’s not complete until it’s threaded well and true all the way from my fingers to the target.

When I get back I stretch (so important, since now I am old, apparently, and if I don’t my body will seize up entirely) and see my wife is watching reality TV with the baby on the floor playing in his little jungle gym, which means I am to make dinner. I shower quickly and put in headphones to listen to Cameron Winter while I start making a Tuscan pasta dish with chickpea pasta (inferior, but less complex carbohydrates), asparagus, tomatoes, some marinara and lemon zest, toasted panko and almonds. I’m not a great cook; my wife isn’t either, but at least when she follows a recipe she can come out of it with something. Recipes are hard for me to focus on. But when I can cook something I’ve cooked a million times and have the freedom and experience to judge by smell and taste and feel of my preparation, whatever I’m making usually comes out well, and the pasta is a small triumph.

My wife and I eat dinner and talk about the news and what funny things we saw or read today, how our parents are doing, marvel at our son who is watching us eat from his mother’s lap with interest we’ve never seen before. He was but a couple of cells one night after the Vampire Weekend concert and now he’s holding his head up on his own, drooling and smiling and cooing.

I’m reminded I am supposed to meet with my friend Caleb that night to go to the movies.

My friend Caleb and I don’t have much in common other than we went to school together and make each other laugh. We’ve known each other since we were 12 and for a couple summers in middle school I went to his house to swim in his pool almost every day. He likes anime and video games and is a talented artist, which are three things I am not into/am not. He doesn’t know I write, which is perfect. You could say, he is not a member of the scene.

He meets me at my house where we hop into my car and drive to the movie theater together, a 20 minute drive, long enough to catch up on life. He has a new job at the baby food factory which is a step up from his previous retail occupations, both in terms of hours and pay. He may even be able to move out of his parent’s house soon.

We see Project Hail Mary. It’s a movie for children, but it’s fine and I liked it. Later, when I sit down to write about it, I realize I have nothing to say which has not already been said. So it often goes. At least with fiction I can—like many do—hide my emptiness with a veneer of ambiguity to entertain the reader into believing in their own cleverness in interpretation. But saying Ryan Gosling is a decent actor helps no one. Besides, I’ve already discussed it at length with my friend in the car ride. My stomach hurts because I wasn’t supposed to get popcorn but I ate it anyway.

When I get home my wife and the baby have long gone to bed, so now it is my time, my only time. I want to begin writing the story I have been thinking of on my runs, but I don’t have it mapped out yet and I’m unsure where to start. Sometimes it helps to dive in and let things become clear as you write it; somehow, I know it won’t be the case this time. Instead I write about five white collar employees who are laid off to be replaced with A.I., who beat up their former C.E.O in his driveway. I hate my job and dread returning from paternity leave, I figure this is a release valve. It’s fun to write, but I choose to write it for the same reason I’d write pornographic sex scenes as a kid: vicarious gratification, which does not make for good fiction. It’s 900 words in only thirty minutes work, but it’s trash. CRTL + Alt + Delete.

I go to bed and my family is totally convened in our room, the dog on her special bed (the old futon from downstairs), the cat in the hovel of his scratching tower, the baby in the basinet, my wife on her side of the bed by the baby. The fan blankets us in cool nighttime air. We don’t have an air conditioner, but I ordered one and it should be in by June because I can’t stand to think my child might be too hot. I used to figure—why get an air conditioner if I can do without? But it’s no longer about me.

It’s late but I try to read my Kindle anyway. The soft light wakes up my wife, who asks how the movie was. We whisper about it and I tell her about Caleb’s new job. We kiss goodnight and I get back to reading (it’s the part of Moby Dick where Ishmael explains what a ‘gam’ is) but my eyes are heavy and after twenty minutes I put it down and fall asleep almost instantly. It used to be I had tremendous problems falling asleep, always, even when I read. But being a dad makes it easy.

Tomorrow I will play soccer with my weekly pickup group, and we will discuss the upcoming World Cup. On Sunday my wife and I will take my son to church and afterward I’ll meet up with the book club group. We’re reading and discussing my novel, but they don’t know I’m ‘Clancy Steadwell’. They are a group of former lawyers and engineers and professors and doctors, everyone seems to love it. Later this week I’ll send the new manuscript of my novella to my sister and get her edits.

And so on and so on.

Yes, the scene is alive and thriving at Clancy Steadwell’s house, this grand epicenter of literary culture.