Overstuffed

My turkey is safe in my freezer. I have bought up all the canned pumpkin and the pie shells and the Cool Whip that I need. This saves me from getting in any fights in the grocery store aisles.

If I were my mom, I would have covered my counters with drying bread cubes by now, all to make Thanksgiving Stuffing. This is the real deal, with the cut-up celery and onions, the chicken broth. My family won’t eat it; they demand Stove-top, which I like too. But once in while, I get a little misty for Mom’s version. Eat some of this for me, will you?

As long as we’re talking about stuffing, I will not name the book I started but didn’t finish this week. The author overstuffed the story with a lot of introductory musings, but no action. Supposedly, when the story takes off, if it ever does, we get a tale about mommies who have left their careers years ago and now wonder if it was worth it.

I read all about the heroine’s friends, who constantly wonder whether to leave the city or stay. And if we leave, do we go to the suburbs? Or to Brooklyn?  I heard all about Mama who, when our woeful heroine was barely old enough to make herself a grilled-cheese sandwich, shut herself behind a door and began to write books. Do not interrupt me, children. Oh, wait, Mama made an exception on the day one of her daughters found blood in her underpants.

Anyway, after fifty pages of this woman ruminating on her entire history, all while walking down the apartment hallway to wake up her ten-year-old son for school (and leaving out no architectural detail of that hallway), I lost hope of anything ever happening.

I hopped the subway, so to speak, and landed on the Lower East Side, where Richard Price set his book, Lush Life. This is a much grittier world, a survival-of-the-fittest kind of place, and a lot of cuss words.

In the middle of the night, four cops cruise the streets, searching for somebody to arrest.  It’s a game, a competition.

Price throws a lot of people at onto his stage. I’m not sure I can map out for you all the cops and the drug dealers, the immigrant shop-keepers and the young and restless city-dwellers walking home after way too much to drink. What an unwieldy cast!

But eventually, somebody gets shot.  And we focus on Eric Cash. Did he narrowly escape a bullet himself? Or was it his hand that pulled the trigger? Well, right now, he’s sitting in the police station. He would like to lay his head down on the table and go to sleep, but a couple detectives just won’t stop asking questions.

Eric is one of those people who came to New York to make it big. New York is full of these types. From what I can tell so far, his dreams haven’t gone well. No acting fame yet. The screenplay he’s writing? He’s embarrassed to talk about it.

Will the cops stop asking his questions? Will he make peace with his New York dreams?

Will I survive all the bleakness and the cusswords?