Fast Lanes
Authors: Jayne Anne Phillips
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories, #Short Stories (Single Author)
Jayne Anne Phillips’s
Fast Lanes
“The author’s sympathy, her ability to imagine herself into the feelings of very different kinds of people, in no way lessens a precision that we are more used to finding at cooler temperatures.… The stories in
Fast Lanes
frequently hover on the edge of poetry.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“One of our most fascinating and gritty writers.… [Phillips’s] keenest asset is her ear, her ability to make art out of the desperate, nervous voices in the nether corners of America.”
—The Washington Post
“Phillips is first-rate at first-person narration. In
Fast Lanes
she adopts distinct voice after voice, and she’s equally adept at all of them.”
—
USA Today
“Phillips weds a bittersweet, lyric prose style with stories that count on our hearts. Scenes from these stories will haunt me for a long time.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Judging from this collection, it seems as if there’s nothing Phillips can’t do … a tremendously talented writer working to the limit of her powers.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Phillips has a gift.… She resists literary voices to discover real ones.… In the streets, the rooms, the truck cabs of her own time, Phillips fares well—in no small part because she hears well.”
—St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Phillips sustains her myriad voices until their words roll with the angry cadences of sex or music.… It’s a kind of dream surfing.… A writer of immense perception, her world view tarnished and yet undiminished by the fragmented reality she presents.”
—The Boston Globe
Jayne Anne PhillipsFast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. She is the author of three novels and two collections of stories. She is the recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Bunting Institute fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction. Her work has been translated into twelve languages.
Also by Jayne Anne Phillips
MotherKind
Shelter
Machine Dreams
Black Tickets
LIMITED EDITIONS
The Secret Country
How Mickey Made It
Counting Sweethearts
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2000
Copyright © 1987, 2000 by Jayne Anne Phillips
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States in different form by E. P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, New York, in 1987.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Comtemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Lyrics on
this page
from “Be My Baby” by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector © 1963 (renewed 1991) Trio Music Company Inc., Universal/Songs of Polygram International Inc., and Bertha Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Lyrics on
this page
from “Blue Moon” by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright © 1934, (Copyright Renewed) by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. All rights controlled by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
These stories have been previously published in
Esquire, Granta, Ploughshares, Rolling Stone, Gallimaufry, Best American Short Stories
, and
Pushcart Prize IV
. “How Mickey Made It” was first published as limited editions by Bookslinger Editions. “Fast Lanes” and “Counting” were first published as limited editions by Vehicle Editions. “Callie” was first published in
Family
(Pantheon Books).
Publisher’s Note: These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Jayne Anne, 1952–
Fast lanes / Jayne Anne Phillips.
p. cm.
Enl. ed. containing 3 additional stories.
Contents: How Mickey made it—Rayme—Fast Lanes—Bluegill—Something that happened—Blue moon—Bess—Callie—Alma—Counting.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80883-7
1. West Virginia—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 2. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS 2566. H479 F37 2000
813′.54—dc21 99-057850
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
v3.1
For Mark
The author wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for support during the writing of this work
.
I have begun my freedom and it hurts.
—ALAN DUGAN
“Stability Before Departure,”
from
Collected Poems
T
his bed is wicked comfortable, I mean I sleep like a baby and don’t wanna wake up. I guess you OWN a bed like this when you’re twenty-eight huh (smile, tawny skin, fine sharp face) and this place is so CLEAN, nothin outa place but your head. Just kidding Darling, don’t get hot (lighting his cigarette, frowning over cupped hands). No I mean older women are fine with me, you’re fine with me really, a little awesome but I’ll call you Mom once in a while just to keep us in line (inhaling, looking up with smoke on his lips). But don’t pull any teen-ager numbers on me, that’s all in the past, remember I’m twenty now, that’s uh, TWEN-TEE—you remember, a week ago when you gave me that book of jokes, those cartoons? in the bar, handed it right over the counter with the little sketch inside of me in my nifty bartender’s coat & cardboard bow tie compliments of Savio’s, what? yeah, she remembers, signed it
with love from your customer
Happy birthday Mickey. Look just because we got a little boozed when you
took me to lunch that next day, and you said I should call in sick so we could go to the beach, doesn’t mean you’re RESPONSIBLE for me. I mean if they fired me for that they were going to fire me anyway. I shoulda given them a better excuse but what the fuck it was a suckass job to begin with. I only had it the month I’ve been back from England, just bread till I get a band together. I’ve been fired plenty from everywhere without your help, so don’t get pent up about it. I’ll get another job tomorrow, don’t worry about Mickey (shakes his head, black curls cut short on top & long in the back, Galahad punk) I mean I haven’t been on my own since I was twelve for nothin, I can get BY you know—I’m a kid but I try real hard.
Ooh, that is intense. That is so intense … softer, a little softer, there. Oh, you feel good.… Relax, we’re OK, really, I’ll pull out.… Take it easy, I’m nowhere near coming—
Yeah for a while I was modeling downtown, what a racket that shit is—guys smearing makeup all over your face, three of them at once while you’re sitting in a chair (stands up out of bed, pulls on black denim pants, white undershirt) and some other guy is brushing your shoes then it’s Stand up Pull in Turn Stop Splat (flexing his long hard legs, goofing on a Marlboro smoker stance) HERE’S the smile you push GOT IT KID?? you better get it. You see I had this whole whatsis portfolio expensive shit and I walked right in and got the job and the others were pissed, really quite the pisser when they’d been licking ass for weeks to get in the office. But after it was all over—four weeks I did it—I burned the whole thing, the job the pictures the assholes, all of it, and I told that fag to get himself another boy. I mean, can you see it, some chumpy fag drooling over those pictures. Suit, swim-suit, towel around the neck, what bullshit, I never played tennis in my life. I’m a SINGER I don’t go for that commercial shit I’LL DO IT MYSELF THANK YOU, Thaaannk Yooooooo!!! Whoo! Jesus.
