Hilarity and Heartbreak

First, a confession of ignorance: I had never heard of George Singleton, though he lives less than an hour away in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Next, a hat tip of gratitude to the person who sent me Singleton’s You Want More: Selected Stories.

In You Want More, a collection of 30 stories set in upstate South Carolina, Singleton gathers together a crowd of eccentrics, men, women, and children often baffled by their rough lives, looking for ways of escape from their circumstances, and struggling to keep their heads above a flood of disasters. These range from college professors to college drop-outs, from a man who has a “knack” for making money on swampland to a pre-bouncer in a bar—as a pre-bouncer he tries to talk unruly patrons out of their mischief before the real bouncer pounds on them—who accidentally records an episode of “Bonanza” over his wife’s videotape of her sonogram.

In “Show-And-Tell,” for example, Mendal Dawes, a third-grader, becomes his father’s emissary of love to Ms. Lola Suber, his father’s old flame and Mendal’s teacher. Lee Dawes first sends Mendal to a show-and-tell day in the classroom with a letter purportedly written by the medieval Heloise to her famed lover Abelard and includes the line “That guy who wrote that ‘How Do I Love Thee’ poem has nothing on us, my sugar-booger-babe.” On other show-and-tell days, Mendal brings in “a genuine Cherokee Indian bracelet and ring” once worn by Lola before her long-ago breakup from Lee; “an old, dried Mayan wrist corsage and matching boutonniere” from their dating days; and a score of other items that once linked them, including “famous love letters, all on lined Blue Horse paper: from Ginger Rogers to Fred Astaire, from Anne Hathaway to Shakespeare, from all of Henry VIII’s wives to him.” 

Here is surely one of the strangest and funniest courtships in all of literature.

“The Novels of Raymond Chandler” introduces us to Ellis Cary, sentenced to 200 hours of community service for attempting to dig up his father’s grave so that he could mingle his mother’s ashes on top of the casket. Cary despised his father, who among other faults had a phobia about germs, and “I wanted to pour my mother’s ashes into my father’s grave so that he would have to live forever covered in a fine dust.” 

As we accompany Cary through his community service, which “involved literally painting the town red”—fire hydrants, brick alleyways, a wooden house where Jefferson Davis had supposedly once slept—we learn that for four semesters he taught a college course on Raymond Carver’s novels. Carver was famous for writing short stories, but never produced a novel, and so Cary uses the class time to talk with students about “love and hate, conformity and rebellion, innocence and experience.” When the administration discovers his deception, Cary is dismissed and so lands back in his hometown of Gruel.

Here is the moment from the story when Cary’s fake course comes to the attention of the administration and an example of Singleton’s subtle, stinging wit:

“We sat in my office. I turned off my computer so he couldn’t read the screen where I was writing up another set of fake courses on the novels of Ring Lardner. I looked out the window at two of my students trying to catch a Frisbee in their mouths. One of them, I knew, would grow up to be an administrator. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Near the end of You Want More is a short riff “Richard Petty Accepts The National Book Award.” Here the famed driver thanks people responsible for his Hewlett-Packard Intel Pentium III, his Greencycle Recycled Steno Books, and the Brown Kraft recycled clasp envelopes. He ends with a salute to a teacher:

“And more than anyone else, we want to thank Mrs. Louise Gowers, who taught us how to type back in high school. F-R-F-R-F-R. J-U-J-U-J-U. Don’t look down at the keys. Ruler on knuckles. A lot of people think it only takes ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ or ‘Call Me’ whatever that guy’s name was on the boat, but I’m here to tell you that it all starts with a ruler on knuckles.”

“Unemployment” takes us back to elementary school and second-grader Mendal’s class Valentine’s Day party. Here Miss Dupre, an innocent schoolteacher, hands out her homemade cookies announcing “Happy V.D.” and then allows the class to sing the “Name Game” song, as in “Mendal, Mendal boo banal banana fanner of fundal.” With classmates named Tucker, Chuck, and Bucky, “our song would have a term I’d heard only once, when my father stepped on a nail.” The principal, Mr. Uldrick, is taking a group of state legislators through the school, hoping for more funding, when he hears the class roaring out these words and orders Miss Dupre to see him after school, where he fires her. As Miss Dupre leaves the principal’s office, now out of a job, she sees Mendal.

“Years later I would say that she blew a kiss, mouthed, ‘Thank you,’ and waved to me in a manner that meant for me to get away and keep going.”

Thankfully, George Singleton did not get away and keep going. Instead, he stayed in his native South Carolina and gave us his stories.

George Singleton is also the author of almost 90 more short stories and two novels, Novel: A Novel and Workshirts for Madmen.