The 505 Crossword Assignment

Had the first sesh (session for the uninitiated) of Stylistics.

Upon completing a crossword, the assignment was to take 25 across words and 25 down words and compose a story.

Here, is my story:

I’d sparred with that knuckle-walking ogre back at the old gym, despite our difference in weight class, age, and overall cred in the amateur boxing world of Akron, Ohio. How I got in, and out of, the ring with this skilled baboon, a k a “Old Scratch” Charlie, so named because everyone figured he would end up throwing a fight at some point in his career, and he was bound to go pro, was a result of vicarious pride, my own stupid pride, and of course, a girl. She wasn’t just some girl though, she was the most beautiful thing on two feet and everyone, including that demon donning boxing gloves, knew it. And she was mine. All mine.
Fump! to the head. Ooof! to the ribs. My face was getting cratered and my ribs were caving to ruins. I couldn’t get him off me. Fucking Tasmanian devil in gilt-covered Everlast trunks. And what were his hands taped with? Every blow felt like he was holding a row of quarters in his fists.  I heard his trainer yell “take it easy!” but the blows kept coming in like sideways rain. It hadn’t been two minutes and my vision was blurred, my legs wobbly, and my core akin to wet paper. I tried to get on my horse but I couldn’t tire that fuck and my nose was a magnet to his laden fists and nothing, nothing was going to sate him till he put me on the canvas. Then told her about it. Did I mention my stupid pride?

My stupid pride is one thing but you would think my trainer would have shown some sense. But no, he was dense with idiotic pride too. He’d had his own career stolen from him, serving as a nam vet. To make matters worse, the trainer of the boxing beelzebub pummeling me, got a draft deferment somehow and enjoyed a brief but successful pro career that parlayed into a lucrative gym ownership. And my trainer, Joe Pesci bless him, thought I was going to be his ticket. He should have thought more about where exactly the ticket would take him when he agreed to throw me to this haymaking motherfucker.
“Move, move, slip it slip it!,” my trainer was yelling from my corner but he came off one punch right into another. Fwap! from a hook, back in with the rangy jab, body blow body blow. Fuck this I thought and almost ran in the ring to get away but he was able to corner me and even after who knows how many consecutive blows, he didn’t tire - one punch after another after another. Holy christ the bell rang and I sat down in the corner while my trainer ran a damp rag over my face and said something about him being vulnerable to an uppercut but any advice other than survive against this guy was wasted quicker than a frat boy at a kegger. “Gimme some water,” I huffed between breaths. The bell rang again and when I stood like a drained noodle, my trainer again said “uppercut, uppercut.”
I wasn’t averse to throwing an uppercut, I wasn’t averse to throwing A punch, I wasn’t averse to throwing myself on the mat and feigning internal bleeding...but the stupid pride...and the girl. He was pummeling me in a corner when he mumbled through his mouthpiece between blows, “that girl of yours,” jab jab, “the one that acts,” jab, hook “like a virgin,” rib shot kidney shot “think I’ll,” jab, cross “make her,” hook, uppercut “mine.” The blow took me down to one knee and he took a spell when his trainer yelled at him “ain’t nobody winning any damn award; take it fucking easy Charlie!” I was surprised he stopped; I could see in his eyes that he wanted to go retro on my ass and finish me because I wasn’t unconscious. The bell to end round two was to no avail: there would be no end. I was getting gored and my boxing life was dripping blood and bile on the tip of a pike.
I could see him, ogling her, a smooth liar, hiding his intentions, waiting outside her math class, smiling, walking to the end of the pier with ice cream cones in hand after they’d dined at some place where they called him champ - “hey!,” my trainer yelled. “You straight?” I nodded but it hurt to nod. “Don’t acts like a hero! You straight?” Again I nodded and again it hurt. My trainer gave me two quick mists of something up my nose. To this day he won’t tell me what it was but I think it was coke or at least speed.
My ears felt like eaten cobs of corn when the bell rang for the last round. The coke or whatever it was put new life into my lungs and legs. Didn’t matter though; he sized me into a corner in seconds and began to toil on my ribs again but this time judo style, with some elbow on the follow through. My trainer was hoarse but kept yelling for me “stick and move, in and out, be a pest, be a pest!” How can I be a pest when I can’t move? He started talking about her again. “She’s,” body blow, “a dancer,” body blow, “right?” Jab, cross, “can’t wait,” jab, cross, “till she,” hook, body shot, “jetes,” uppercut, cross, “on my,” step back, “cock!” He unleashed a barrage of uppercuts and crosses low and high like a jackhammer crushing concrete: foomfoomfoomfoomfoomfoom. I crumbled again to one knee but this time he couldn’t stand himself and he reared back to let go a blow to my chin sure to separate my jaw when I uppercutted that fucker in his nutsack organ so goddamn hard he could have sung an aria above middle C. My arm held a perfect ell shape as I continued to try to push his nuts so far up into his intestines that they resembled cookie dough. He picked the wrong enemy to try and wargame with.

Even this many years later, after an ale or ten, I can tell my old trainer that story and that sum-bitch elates like a giant party balloon. I wasn’t his ticket out but when I remind him of that, he realizes for a minute or two that it ain’t so bad sometimes, being in.

Prompt:

Using your completed crossword puzzle from last week’s class, compose a story. You must use at least 25 of the across words and 25 of the down words, excluding proper nouns. Please bold all words you use, and list separately at the conclusion of the story. Optional challenge: Use all words in succession, across words first, down words second. 

The 505 1st

As of this writing, I am enrolled in a graduate stylistics course, hereafter, the 505.

Here is an assignment.


Write: Imagine you have been asked to write liner notes for a musical album (your fave).
Liner notes may give brief descriptions of songs, or may give some cultural/historical/biographical data. The genre is open. Your job: to compose those album liner notes, discussing whatever it is you want to discuss, but in a way that reflects the style of the music. So, for instance, if you choose a hip-hop album, the liner notes should read like the hip hop music they address. If you write about country, the liner notes should be in "countrese."

My fave you ask. Not the fave but a fave: August and Everything After from Counting Crows.

 Maria says she’s dying, through the door I hear her crying.

Why?

Hear me out. Hear it out. When you’ve got nothing but time this, thing between us, is worth the time.

Everything works. It all fits and it needs worn. Maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’ve done this sort of thing before. Maybe it’s a love/hate relationship with August. Maybe he’s not your type but I’m sure there’s something in a shade of grey.  You laugh with insecurity and tell me the words, so many words, don’t hit you in the gut and don’t make you feel wrenched or torn or wistful, and it just doesn’t do it for you. But maybe, man, I’m right. As right as the rain that falls in Baltimore, and maybe the words matter because words matter so damn much to you and me that’s why we can’t tear our ears away; not in 1993 and not and now in 2019.

Because: I walk along these hillsides in the summer 'neath the sunshine I am feathered by the moonlight falling down on me

Maybe you’re just afraid, afraid of knowing,  of giving in, of being changed by it. What would that do to you? Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you won’t or can’t feel, in fear, the periphery from the core, the essential from the meaningless. Maybe some things are too bright. For you.

Because: Start threading a needle, brush past the shuttle that slides through the cold room. Start turning the wool across the wire, roll a new life over.

I want you to love August. I want you to feel the way I feel when the keyboard swells from nothingness and that guitar riff reverberates on the opening track like death fading to life. I want you to be transported the way I am; to know that you’ll feel something, about music, about words, about life...and how lyrics and music are important and why they express BOTH the terrestrial and the sublime of humanity. I want you to recognize. What’s wrong with you? if you don’t.

Because: Round here we talk just like lions but we sacrifice just like lambs. Round here she’s slipping through my hands.

You don’t believe me and I don’t blame you. I can’t blame you because I know what’s at stake. Judge lest ye be judged but as I write these words baby, thinking about it, I’m willing…to be judged. By you.

Because: When the kindness falls like rain, it washes her away and Anna begins to change my mind...

And your mind matters and your heart matters and you deserve this. We all deserve this; it’s why we’re here, you and me, us and them: to be moved. Like this. To know art and how it’s a door that needs opened so life -your life, my life, our lives- can be looked at, heard, felt. Lived. But you have to let it, convince it, shove it tabula rasa into your heart.

Because: Lay me down in a field of flame and heather, render up my body into the burning heart of god in the belly of a black-winged bird.

I hope you let it in.