2 posts tagged “chris ernest hall”
I hang out with people.
Helen of Santa Zita is a novel of mine with a long and tangled history. When I abandoned work on Notes For a Future Novel, there was a lot there I couldn't bear to leave behind, especially the scenes I had written from Helen's point of view. So I extracted them and created a novella out of them titled "Helen of Santa Zita"; the title being a joking reference to the mythological Helen, who is forever connected to the city that was destroyed in her name.
In 2000 when I ended my two and a half year hiatus from writing, inspired by a friend's interest in it, I picked up Helen of Santa Zita and began working on it again. I finished Part I in early 2001, but then put it away so I could return to "1989 A Novel", which is what I had been working on when I started my hiatus in fall 1997.
As part of my exhumation of the Chris Ernest Hall archives I found the drafts from 2001 and found them pretty entertaining, and was amazed at how much I had forgotten that I had written, considering it was only six years ago. So I thought I would post an extract here.
The novel starts with a bank, as you are plunged mid-stream into Helen's thoughts:
Everything was fucked and she had nowhere to go. She couldn't drop out of school. She couldn't get back together with Todd. Helen Zachary took a deep breath and ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, feeling the burn of the cheap Bloody Mary mix aftertaste. She was so full of anger. Anger at Todd. Anger at the world. Anger at herself. Anger she could taste on her tongue, like she had just thrown up an entire stomach full of Milwaukee's Best.
She hated the whole ordeal of breaking up and it had been going on for far too long. It had been nearly two weeks since her boyfriend Todd had dumped her. Not only did she not have a boyfriend now, but she was flunking a class and running out of money. Helen wanted to run away-she never wanted to hear the name Santa Zita or stay there another minute; she hated it so much and was so tired of classes, her house and everything else.Another spasm of tears seized her. Through her smeared vision Helen tried to see how Jessica and Roxy were reacting to this. Were they already dialing the men in white coats to come and drag her away? She couldn’t see them, though. Just as well. She squeezed her eyes shut, so tight she started to see stars inside her brain. She sniffed and wiped her eyes for the tenth time with the same tissue. She wadded the tissue up and tossed it to her right, where it landed along with the other tissues she had used that night. She rubbed her eyes with the forefingers of her right and left hands. When she opened them, she could see again. Her friends were not looking at her with disgust, gathering up their things to escape this house of madness–just looking at her with smiles–worry in their eyes, but smiling nonetheless.
“God, I feel so lame about this,” Helen said to them. Jessica and Roxy were her two best friends in Santa Zita, and the worst part of all of this was the thought of them seeing her in this incapacitated, disintegrated state.“Don't worry, Helen. We understand,” said Jessica.
“Yeah, totally, we do,” said Roxy.
Read the rest at The Writing of Chris Ernest Hall
