lit crit

 There is a slapdash aspect to the ending.  I felt like this was as far as it far as it was going to go and it was time to wrap it up.  Gina had been slowly moving towards itch and I thought I might as well give her to him.  I should have gone back and built up the scenes where Catfish walks past Claudette's door a few times in the course of the story.  She was his first lay in Champaign and he treated her badly and though he was not much of a guy for guilt you could tell he felt bad about it.  I kind of liked her tragic story, would-be poet living in a drab apartment and having to walk all those miles in her waitress shoes.  I feel like maybe I could write a story from her point of view.

When you write a story after awhile a peculiar thing starts to happen and that is that the characters take on a life of their own and do things that you did not intend them to do when you first put them in.  I don't think Ron was ever a good guy.  Probably why he punched out Big Red was that he didn't like the guy in the first place, and then it fed his ego to take Catfish under his wing, but he was always like a bad influence on Catfish, like the devil standing on Catfish's shoulder.  He left Catfish at the Club 45 because he didn't really care what happened to him.

There was a guy who Catfish was modeled after, kind of a country guy among us University snob types who had a lot of charisma and had considerable luck with the ladies, and did work at the Big Job in Clinton but was never on our softball team,

There was a singing waitress at the House of Chin, an opera student she went down the stairs to the kitchen full of Chinamen singing the song of the Valkyries, she hung around the bar a bit and was well liked but was never a part of our activities.

Itch is modeled a little after me with his pretensions and thinking he is always so goddamn smart, but I made him more athletic than I ever was.

I have a friend who was a writer and actually had a book published and we used to email each other, send our writings to each other and get opinions because it is really hard to get anybody, even your good friends, to read what you have written.  A painting all you have to do is look at it ten seconds and say "Yeah that looks pretty good," but a story you have to sit down and read.  He started writing Catfish and then I started doing my own version because I thought he was getting a little stodgy.  

Well we wanted to tell our story about the gang at Chin's.  I think most people have a period of their life when they were young and hung in a crowd and seemed to have the most fantastic adventures that were distinct to them, but later when they look around, they see that many of their later friends were also part of groups of young people who had fantastic adventures.  

Thanks very much for the comments.  I have other stories and I think I will keep posting them here because it is so good to have an audience.  The next one will be another story about the House of Chin.