There was a time when writers endured periods of being hated before being admired or being admired by a hateful few, men with astigmatic pinched skin or those harridans of culture anarcho syndicalist suffragettes without a cause; their ardor, directed your way, would be the antithesis of desire, or My Way. That my best friend electrocuted a frog is a difficult admission to make if only to be briefly hated before gaining a little traction with the follow-up “in search of a cure for polio.”
Children cope with this guilt by association far better than adults. They might take the frog eletrocution in stride until Middle School which is called Middle for its clever evocation of the Middle Ages. Friendship has been covered over the centuries by Cicero, De Amiticia, and Jerry Seinfeld ( “You have a mom! I have a mom too!”) with perhaps equal amounts of success.
Maybe this is overly Russian of me but I did imagine a certain exile period of being hated by a gaggle of Trotskyites living out their days in Guadalajara smoking Camels and filling notebooks with thoughts of scabrous vengeance on the donkey riding padre who tormented them in Middle School. I don’t who let the side down in this case. Me? Them? Father Serra?
My untrained eye fails me here. Perhaps all fiction evokes the idea that the fragments of memory fall victim to the superior imagination which is why so much work is devoted to putting Aristotle in your hands like a titanium driver: hey, try this guy. Hit the ball harder.
Who hates ya, baby? That’s the real question.