Who’s On Second

By Ethan Bernard

When you get to writing school they advise you against composing a story in the second person. You are a bit embarrassed, because at first you are unsure what they mean. Then they remind you that second person is a "you" story and that you must write in either "first" (I) or "third" (he/she). "You" is too tricky and never seems to come out right. Second is like some forbidden gear on a stick shift, the kind where the car may rev too hot and blow up. That makes it tempting. Stories don't possess a fourth gear.

You had an idea that writing comes from somewhere deep in your "soul," a place that doesn't know the second person from the person who runs the laundromat. Felt that writing is the most important thing there is—as a vehicle to reveal your greatness. And your generation needs a voice. Who will give form to the madness? You used to feel that writing school was the last place to go to become a writer. Experience was the best teacher, like Miss True back in fifth grade, but you finally abandoned that idea after spending time in the real world. After it nearly drove you crazy with all its realness, sometimes veering into too real and often skidding over into way too real--and seeing as how you weren't doing much in the way of writing, instead thinking about writing, the real world, and the Artist--perhaps writing school wasn't such a bad idea.

If you were wrong about writing school, perhaps the teachers at writing school are wrong about the second person. Maybe that doesn't make sense. Then you find out that there are two people who wrote things in the second person and they've got a lot of writing cred: a novel about a guy who does drugs in a large urban area and a woman writing a story about being a writer. They also say that you shouldn't write a story about a guy who does drugs, or—up there with the second person—write about being a writer. They've been done before. So basically these two people broke every rule in the book, and came out on top. They played it so well that after they broke the rules, the rules didn't change, and no one can break those rules without being compared to them.

It's like when you wrote that story about the Asteroid Belt, which is not a planet, so it doesn't get a lot of press. Actually, the thing's not that dense. You can drift halfway to forever without passing a single space rock. There's something special in that—tied to your greatness. And your writing teacher, while offering constructive criticism, says that he has in fact used the Asteroid Belt in a previous novel. He's added a few details, though. Some astronomy crap you didn't even know about. Asteroid B-12 shaped like a pomegranate, emitting radiation in the key of C. You are free to use it, of course, but it has already been done—by him.

The Asteroid Belt story you wrote is told in "third person omniscient" and the power of it starts to go to your head. You are becoming quite the connoisseur of point of view. Everyone has one. You even do something in first person plural (We), just for kicks. But the second person keeps calling out in a thick Brooklyn accent: Hey, …

So you step out of a bar one night in winter in a large urban area and you get this idea. The snow is gathering in the streetlights like moths and you are drunk and, well, these are the things stories are made of. So you take the scene and connect it with something that happened, kinda real, but you are going to stretch it into a story.

The next day you write. Stretch. Reflect. You put in a semi-colon; you take it away. You decide to try to avoid the use of semi-colons. It will keep you close to the rest of humanity. When complete you haven't stretched too much as the piece ends up only three pages long. They call that a "flash."

Sometimes happiness is a faded pair of black jeans…

The story is about a friend's wedding back in college seen from a snowed-out point in the future, and you are the best man. You've arrived late and missed the rehearsal dinner because you needed to buy a pair of black jeans for the occasion, to go with a sport coat, no tie. A wedding in the California redwoods, casual, you think.

A best man who sleeps in a sleeping bag under the stars should wear what he wants. Your friend will understand because you've talked about poetry with him, and how it ought to be written. Talked poetry until 3 a.m., like members of the resistance plotting to take out a train.

The jeans are the first, though perhaps most crucial, in a string of social faux pas, each one a strand you fashion into a sturdy rope—later a noose—of social embarrassment. Most people laugh but are kind of upset.

Your friend's dad is wearing a leisure suit and a pair of running shoes. Yet he is laughing at you.

His wife is not laughing. You get drunk. It gets worse.

You've never owned black jeans again.

As you type the "i" sticks on your computer. Sometimes you have to press it twice. Adversiiiiity. Add the lambent burn of the future snow beneath the streetlights, the lost youth and crushed dreams in a salt-water taffy swirl… that's what stories are made of. You process the ore of experience into fictional gold. The second person, that's your processor.

When you take it in to writing class some guy says, Why'd you ruin your buddy's wedding? You tell him the author is not the narrator. It's like pleading the Fifth. One girl is intrigued by the story. Something in it speaks to her. She tells you it's great and all, but there's just one thing: she needs more jeans. Yes, we all do. Another girl brings in a story about losing her virginity in the second person. It is met with admiration. She later wins a small prize.

During the last six months of writing school you go back to railing against writing school and saying, get me back to the real world. It's all over in a flash, and you're left with a couple friends, a pile of half-finished stories and a considerable indebtedness to several large financial institutions.

You teach a couple of classes on writing. Your loans come due. You seek more gainful employment. You find a job that utilizes your acumen for all things verbal. You know that a mountain road is tortuous and life with student loans is torturous. Actually, you find a series of jobs where you are charged as lookout for mistakes. Great pods of misplaced commas streaming across an ocean of legal documents. You must both sound the alarm and harpoon them. Your tenure on lookout seems indefinite.

Going to school, debating if you should go to school, and railing against school while you're there have made up a large portion of your life. You know that the school period of your existence has come to a definitive conclusion. The "new voice" will be left to others. The madness still appears formless.

You decide to get really bitter about not making it, turn your back on the scribe's life, do lewd things, write about them, and then bask in literary glory while thumbing your pen at the world. That's a kind of plan.

One friend gets an agent. Another even lands a book deal. This idea of a book intrigues you. You do some research and discover it involves actually writing a book-length manuscript. A kind of essential ingredient, like cow to steak.

However, you still have that piece, the one about the thing that happened with the jeans and the streetlights. You also have the Asteroid Belt story. That one is crap. You know that now. You research further and find there are places that publish "flash fiction." No, you won't get rich, but this was never about getting rich or famous. It was about the writing. Also greatness, but more writing, sure.

You scale down your dream. Where once it was to be the voice of your generation, you now want to be the third person to write second. Sure, more people have done the second thing than that, some with a great deal of success. But those other two are your benchmarks. And now you will be third. The third one to write second, kind of ironic. Not metonymic. No.

Who's on second? You are. Yeah.

You tell this to a friend from writing school after consuming a large quantity of alcohol. She is turning her prize-winning second-person story into a novel. She doesn't get it, she says, and shrugs, then smiles.

Third on second,you say.

She does not understand. But the details of her story from writing class have now become more intriguing.

In those unsettled hours before escaping into sleep, the vision usually arrives. You are being interviewed in a Western European country other than France. Nothing against France, of course; it's just that you are already so popular there you want to spread the wealth into neighboring countries. Maybe Belgium. They are scarred as a locale for German invasion. And you want to turn that image around. It's not their fault. Geography is destiny.

The interview is in English, even though you speak their language, whatever that might be. The people want to see you using your native speech. They say your tongue can cut silver. It makes sense in Belgian. The interviewer wants to know how it can be that you've used words to stitch black denim into a masterpiece, with some judges even whispering about it in Sweden.

Who's on second? you say.

Excuse me? the interviewer responds.

Then you explain it's also a play on words related to a comedy routine from a duo popular in America in the middle of the twentieth century. You substituted second where the duo said "first," but, in fact, you were third on second. It works on many levels.

The interviewer doesn't understand either, which you find distressing, because this other person exists only in your mind.

You send out the piece—over the Internet. Flash. It's kind of newfangled and electronic. Truth be told, you have sent out other stories and the results have been mixed. That is about 100 have been rejected and two now appear on the Internet. You are told that this is a good sign. A 2% full glass is a good sign.

The first 10 responses for the story pass in a blur of automatic replies. They are negative. You are in a relationship that has gone sour. You cannot meet their needs. No one asks for more jeans. The 11th comes with some editor comments.

Editor 1: Maybe, though the second person perspective fails to convey the woe of the drunken poet/misunderstood artist.

Editor 3: No. This would have been a 'maybe' if it had been nonfiction, but it's flabby. Story bogs down in middle.

Editor 1 thinks the second person failed. Well, the whole thing is about failure and evidently it was precisely there where you succeeded. Anything better would undermine the whole project. Can't Editor 1 see that in misunderstanding your piece he has disproved his own criticism?

And Editor 3, well, she thinks you're ('maybe') OK as long as you're real, but as fiction it's as if someone's put an air-hose in your mouth and pumped until your ass can't wedge onto a loveseat. Bogs down in middle? You find this particularly galling. The story is three pages long. You have somehow injected a jar of Crisco into a peanut.

As for Editor 2, he took a pass. The deciding vote and he recuses himself because of a conflict of interest.

You can continue to be misunderstood, further validating the effectiveness of the story, but then you'll have to tap into the once walled-off reservoirs of self-esteem established from that really funny book report on The Hobbit you did back in Miss True's class (A++). That prospect does not seem encouraging.

One evening you meet with that friend from writing school. You have met with her a couple of times and are unsure if the term "friend" is still altogether appropriate. You've exchanged writing. She's given you an extract from her novel. You possess various stories in assorted stages of development but for her you've updated the flash (now 2.5 pages).

With this girl you affect a cynical demeanor while at the same time, partially hidden, is your sensitivity, like the cream filling in a Twinkie.

You've taken her to a wine bar where you listen to the kind of jazz you are always on the verge of almost liking. Over the second carafe of the house red you both start talking about writing, your own. The first carafe was spent criticizing the writing of others.

In her novel she's abandoned the second person.

Why not choose first? you ask.

It's not all about me, she says. Third seemed right. In second something just felt off. Maybe the writing teachers were on to something.

Up to this point you've taken their word as law, a kind of commandment that has made you a rebel by breaking it. What was off?

Good for a day trip, not an extended stay, she says. Perhaps it got too experimental, like a sexual position you try once just to say you did it.

Interesting.

You scoot your chair forward. Maybe soon you, too, will attempt a novel. The jazz continues and the vibration of the bass makes your chest rumble.

The talk turns to characters for a while and then things shift over to you. You pause and stare out the window. No snow, just the half-dark of the city street.

You used to write poetry? she asks.

It happens.

Did you show your friend the story?

No.

You've talked to him on and off for years, his English Ph.D, the birth of his first child, but communication eventually trailed off, usually on your end. The last you heard he said he saw a couple of pieces of yours on the Internet. He'd asked if you were still writing. You never responded.

She mulls the situation. And sips her wine. And taps her fingers thoughtfully against her cheek. Perhaps rather than ruining you actually "saved" your friend's wedding. She smiles. From mediocrity.

Thanks, you say.