Touch and Go
by Eugene Stein
Touch and Go, Eugene Stein's recently published story collection—You know, that silly little book with the tuft of red fur on the cover—recalls the curl of of lemon peel that occasionally accompanies a cup of espresso. There's a temptation to ignore it as a trendy bit of showbiz, but put it to work, and it offers subtle, delectable nuances. Beneath the sun-bright wink of its surface lies a bitter, complex tang.
Consider two very short pieces—just a few pages each—that at first feel like little more than smartly written gags: In "One City," Stein (whose one previous book was the novel Straitjacket and Tie) conflates New York and Los Angeles into a trouble-free idealized metropolis:
"...I took the B train down to Greenwich Village and then transferred to the D. I stayed on the D train a few stops and got off at Santa Monica Boulevard...Sandra Bullock and Grace Paley were eating lunch together at the deli..."
"Dream of Life" offers a jokey sequence of entries from the journal of a man largely uninterested in his own life who devotes himself to worshipping rock poet Patti Smith, ultimately becoming the ghostwriter of her autobiography.
While certainly built to amuse, these sketches are underpinned with the melancholy of misguided fantasy. So exuberant in describing their dream lives, the narrators seem all too charmed by their own fugues. Their smiley words are strangely disengaged from reality.
The best of Touch and Go's longer stories build on this theme, featuring characters with less elaborate, but more dangerous, imaginations. In both "Close Calls" and "Death In Belize," Stein presents young men whose willful misperceptions of their own mundane actions lead to genuine peril.
"Close Calls," is a familiar story, sharply told. The unnamed narrator, a Los Angeles television executive, slips slowly into mix-and-match drug addiction (Xanax, Quaaludes, booze, Valium, etc.) as he tries to cope with a friend's death and family ghosts during the busiest time of his work year. His fantasy, of course, is that he's got things perfectly under control. He bats away others' concern for him with self-satisfied obliviousness.
"Spare me your maudlin Betty Ford diatribe," he snaps at a caring friend, admiring his clever phrase as he turns it.
"That's a pretty good sentence," he says to himself.
"Betty got better," retorts the friend, who's not just clever, but smart to boot. (Quite like the author, in fact).
"Death In Belize," is the collection's vibrant, heartbreaking stand-out. Greg, a lonely 27-year-old American travelling solo in Latin America befriends Jorge a sweet, charming 22-year-old Colombian and the two become travelling and sleeping companions for a few days. Though Jorge tells him not to, Greg quaffs ripe, fresh fruit juice. While snorkelling, he cannot resist touching poisonous stinging coral. Overjoyed by the slightest twinkle of romance in his life, Greg allows himself to become irrationally emboldened. By story's end, he pays dearly for this cockeyed optimism. Stein craftily sweeps the reader along in Greg's misguided enthusiasm, while simultaneously allowing an observer's distance. You can see this guy is headed for a fall, yet you fall for him—and with him—all the way.
