Another Straight White Male Writer Writes

Growing old is a weary thing. It’s why trees and humans wrinkle with time, drying up the youthful moisture of juiceboxes and lemonade, and replaced with dehydrating bourbon and cold weather. We stagnate in motion until our feet stand still and turn into roots, planted firmly in the ground where none can move us from positions we fought to attain, save the axe.

On one such cold winter morning, John Cullings sat outside of the corner bar and grill, forcing his young, moist waitress to brave the temperatures every ten minutes or so to check on him. John didn’t care, he was not here for her, but for himself.

Each time she came out, Jenn Cantur stared through the middle-aged, balding man and secretly wished he’d choke on his fries. But he didn’t and what’s worse, he never glanced at her to see her shivering cold intentions or body. Not pausing from his writing, he’d simply mumble, ‟More bourbon” and push his empty cup toward the side of the table where she stood.

Jenn Cantur took the empty glass over and over again, and John Cullings pushed it back to her over and over again. Fueled by her service, he furiously poured words over the pages, much of which would have to be edited to make up for the bourbonous haze, even more of which would never see the light of day — even this dim gray sky — after he took the pages home and tossed them on his desk.

The desk was mountainous, avalanching papers down to the covered floor. The words didn’t matter and readers didn’t matter, just as Jenn Cantur didn’t matter. Just the emotion of getting the words out of John Culling’s senescent, wrinkled body mattered, for one day, the axe man would come and the avalanche would stop and still no one would care even though he was a straight white male writer, blessed by the gods.

On that day, when John Cullings was finally chopped down, Jenn Cantur stayed warm inside the restaurant and talked with Kathie the day shift all day long. She thought, ‟Today’s a good day” and didn’t care to realize why. She laughed at Kathie’s story about her and her wife’s newborn baby and caught a glimpse of her own smile in the mirror over the bar. She pulled down on her cheek and made a mental note to pick up some skin cream on the way home from work, then went back to filling up the glasses of strangers.