Too fictional for fiction

Recently I have learned of a young man who, at the age of nineteen, moved to Casper, Wyoming, to marry a woman he met on IRC. He is born-again. He folds paper in the ancient Japanese tradition of origami. Not the animal variety, but geometric origami...intricate fractals based on mathematics. He has an art show coming up in Brasilia. His fan base in Brazil is huge, and obsessed fans overnight him boxes of paper for him to fold.

He has all the hallmarks of a great character--contradictions, strong convictions, transnational appeal even. The facts; you'd like to put them in a test tube and shake them up a bit, like a chemsitry set. Internet romance, origami, Brasilia. Imagine obsessed Brazilians stalking you, perhaps even going insane wanting a special folded polyhedra just for them. Imagine traveling to Brasilia to give a talk to art enthusiasts. You just want to put this person on paper and push him around a bit and see what he'd do.

But if I assigned them all to a person in a short story you'd throw down the manuscript and dismiss it as a contrivance. Too rich. It's got me thinking of the moments and people in life that are too fictional for fiction...

• Like The Hockey Player (who I recently ran into at the Minneapolis Eagle). I met The Hockey Player many years ago. He came over in a Minnesota Wild jersey, lugging a twelve pack of Labatt's and a tin of chew. The Hockey Player drove the Zamboni at a suburban hockey rink in Wayzata. He played amateur hockey. He chewed snuff (which I actually find sexy) and built fountains. Yes, he was obsessed with fountains. One day he came over with a fountain he made out of plexiglass (you know, the kind that rings a hockey rink). We drank Labatt's and filled his fountain with water. While it bubbled, we had sex on the bed. His breath smelled like minty Copenhagen
• Once I was sitting on a bench on the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was the middle of the day and the sidewalks were full of people rushing about. A youngish blind woman with a long white cane was walking through the crowd when another woman stepped on the cane, snapping off the last twelve inches. I watched the sighted woman apologize profusely as the blind woman tried to figure out what to do--she had a length of cane just short of being effective. The other woman apologized more and more as the blind woman said, "What am I going to do?" Eventually, the sighted woman just walked away! I wrote about this in a short story and showed it to friends, who balked at the scene and told me to cut it--too contrived! So I have to keep a story like this to myself. I can't share it with you.
• In London, I met this boy and I still wonder where/who he is. Christopher was an illegal immigrant from Poland, and he lived in a flat in Queens Park with five other Polish illegals and a lesbian named Mila. He and Mila, being the queers, shared a fold-out bed. We met on the tube. We cruised each other. Our knees touched. I went back to his place. Later I find out, in this polish restaurant in Shepherds Bush, that he tried to commit suicide because he was gay, to escape the Polish army. Later I find out his real name is Piotr. We would make giant potato dishes and eat them with his roommates, who would later borrow his VCR to watch porn and take turns beating off in the toilet. He was beautiful. I watched him take baths. I wrote a bad novel about us. It was totally contrived.
• Roy and I used to drink at Kettner's. He is British and wears suits and only drinks champagne. We'd have bottle after bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Three bottles later, twenty cigarettes, and two bowls of small strawberries, eleven pm, we'd stumble into the dining room and I would have a hamburger and he'd have the all day English breakfast. You don't believe me but its totally true. I can never write about this shit.

no more porn on veoh | how to make a playlist for a girl | the united states is monitoring everything we fucking do | nsfw: gay equivalent of college fuck fest | underage girls rob myspace pervert man