“I’m going to be somebody real soon,” I tell people all the time.

      Because it’s going to happen. My first novel was published this year, and when the economy picks up and people start buying books again, mine will be discovered and I’ll be famous.

      I’m a writer, always looking for a story. Not somebody who will tell me one I can cut-and-paste together, but a once-in-a-lifetime tale only I can tell.

      “Take me to a place I’ve never been,” I’d told so many others trying to get published. “And tell me a new truth.”

      Therein lies the rub: it’s all in the writer’s head. From wherever and whenever or whyever, fact or fantasy, an idea or an image ignites my imagination--concept plus characters plus conflict equals story. Metaphor with meaning, spiked with a dash of irony, brings payback.

      Yeah, I’m good at this. But little did I suspect that a story was about to hit, that I’d be taken to new place to discover a truth everyone else already knew…reality I had been sleeping through.  

      Buying the Sunday New York Times had long been a family tradition, lately at the little coffee stop in the center of the little town a mile and a half down the road.

      The week before a stunning blond was behind the counter. Her friendly country smile and lovely body were still dancing in my head seven days later as I drove in for this Sunday’s edition.

      The blond was gone; a new coffee waitress had taken her place, tall and slim with long brown hair, pretty, in a mannequin sort of way, as if life as I like to think I know it was somehow missing.

      “I’m having the time of my life and I’m sure you are too,” I said when she asked and that almost got a smile. As I walked to my car, I was trying to remember last week’s blond.

      That didn’t happen. On the short drive home, the blond vanished forever, but instead of seeing the new waitress, I got something else, something weird. Was it her long hair and lithe frame or the lifelessness in her eyes that projected a completely unexpected image…from a fantasy classic – Homer’s Odyssey? She became one of the alluring sirens, complete with wings! But for some reason, she was unable to fly.

      Was she stuck here? Where away did she want to fly? 

      Whoa! What’s going on here? Man sees Woman, his id flares up, his ego chimes in---standard Freudian procedure. But a winged siren? She hadn’t just turned me on; she’d lit me up. Who is this woman?

      Back at home I had work to do. With one more short story, my anthology would be ‘put to bed’. And with my second book, I’d no longer be just a first novelist, but a real writer!

      Mostly I write fantasy and science fiction---Alien creatures and machines, futuristic technology, whatever; inspiration can come from anywhere. And when it hit…

      I’d started ‘The Cosmonaut Has Come’ about the first man in space, lost on a secret mission, ‘undead’ in orbit for nearly half a century. A small meteor strikes Colonel Victor Lelak’s capsule sending him back to earth. He lands in his beloved Motherland expecting to be named a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ and awarded the ‘Order of Lenin’ only to discover what he believes to be a ‘Capitalist conspiracy,’ and an “Imperialist plot’ to keep him from uniting with the ‘ True Communist State.’

      His body empowered with stellar energy, Lelak goes on a rampage. But when he realizes that the Marxist-Leninist Communism that had raised him to become ‘The New Soviet Man’ has long since fallen into the dustbin of history, his heart breaks and he dies. ‘Better a Dead Red.’

      Awarded a row of old Soviet medals posthumously, Colonel Lelak is buried with solemn honors in the Kremlin Wall.

      Nyet! There’s no payback telling readers dated truths nobody cares about any more.

      “It’s not about telling the story right,” somebody famous once wrote, “But telling the right story.”

      Soon it was Sunday again and as I drove into town, I couldn’t help seeing that new coffee waitress as a Homeric winged siren. I’m hardly Odysseus, but as a lifelong fanboy, I’ve always had a soft spot for fantasy babes.

      After I paid for my Times, I had to ask her, “Where do you want to go from here?”

      I’ve asked that question often--bank tellers, retail clerks, folks at the library, guys doing community service at the landfill. Too often, people didn’t know where they wanted to go or had already gotten there, their lives at an end where they were.  

      “I’m going to be a Mental Health professional,” she said and in an instant the grounded siren took wing, a woman on a quest with spirit in her eyes!

      On the way home, a new image flashed up from my art school days: Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Though the painter’s Renaissance masterpiece had a more Victorian shape, it was her flowing hair, her ‘pixie’ nose and the light in her eyes that set me off.

      From Odyssey siren to newborn love goddess! Who is this woman?

      A ‘mental health professional’—maybe I needed one myself. Years before, as a social worker, I had worked in a day program with a full caseload and started a newsletter which evolved into a 32-page monthly magazine: The Inner Circular, named by the clients with the tagline, ‘About us, by us.’

      My name wasn’t on it. The clients did all the writing. I edited their entries, then added graphics xeroxed from books and magazines as ‘ads’ for various programs.

      The Inner Circular was a quirky success which contributed to my firing.

      “We are here to help and serve the mentally ill,” I was told. “But you…you want these clients to…do stuff!”

      Mental Health quickly did away with me, but I had saved some copies somewhere. I found four issues, hopped in my car, and drove back into town.

      “Uh-oh,” she said when I returned as if part of the Times was missing.

      I showed her The Inner Circular and she seemed interested. Her name was Erica and she had a degree in Psychology. She thanked me for them and back home I went.

      ‘The Hearing Aid’ would complete my anthology. An old woman, depressed and living alone begins hearing the voices of those she had loved and outlived. Her dearly departed friends and husbands console her, telling her that death is the finale of life and should be embraced rather than feared.

      Dreaded dementia or was there something wrong with her new-fangled hearing aid she’d bought from that young, handsome, fast-talking door-to-door salesman?

      “It’s like magic,” he promised.

      Hadn’t she read the fine print?

      Then her daughter, who died young in a traffic accident, pleads with her to treasure every single second left because this life is the best one we’ll ever have.

      It is at the moment that the old woman realizes how precious life is that she is ready to die and does so.

      Gag me with a spoon! What kind of payback is that?

      C’mon, writer. Just one more damn story!

      My creative juices were flowing, bubbling over with visions of...Erica, siren and goddess.

      “God, I wanna sleep with her!” My raging ego cried out while my uncensored id shouted a completely different verb.

      What’s new about that? I’d been alone since my marriage ended two years before. Lonely and wanting…or was there something else happening? One image led to another. ‘It is what it is,’ is not writer thinking. Where is this going? What is Erica about?

      ‘Super Bowl C’ would do it. In a coma for more than forty years, an old man wakes up to discover that at long last, his team, perennial NFL losers, would be playing in the Super Bowl.

      But it’s not the same old game he used to watch on TV. Not only are the athletes bigger, faster and stronger, but a series of wide-angled 3-D/HD screens put him right in the middle of the ultimate sporting event as if he were on the field.

      Everything is new except…

      Same ol’, same ol’ – his teams blows the lead and loses late.

      Been there, done that for too many football fanatics! Moving on…

      ‘The Vampire Serial Killer’ – Infected by his abusive lover, he drives half a wooden hanger into her heart and sets out to stalk and kill her old boyfriends before he dies himself from ‘lack of nourishment.’

      Derivative trash!

      Nothing was working. Most of the time I could only think about Erica. 

      Was I in love with this woman? I didn’t even know her. But I did love dreaming about her. When I became a real writer, when I was finally somebody…Local author makes it big, bangs pretty babe. That was it? As obvious and as clichéd as the stories I couldn’t bother to finish?

      Where was this going?

      During the week, I stopped in at the local Walgreens. Suddenly Erica was there. She came up and talked to me about The Inner Circular, about how creative and well done the issues were.  

      I, of course, made pithy remarks about the Mental Health System. Erica turned her head and smiled. Her trademark ‘pixie’ nose made for a money profile.

      My imagination snapped pictures as she spoke. Winter was blowing in and she was wearing a heavy coat with a green scarf. Standing in front of a display of holiday decorations, an aura shimmered around her; she was glowing like a Christmas tree!

      On came a parade of images, flashing like photographs---A super-model! Not in a sexy bikini or gracing a centerfold, but in a full-page, high-end fashion layout in The New Yorker or Vogue or the NY Times.

      “God, I wanna sleep with her!” cried my ego and super-ego over the profane plans of my bellowing id.

      I drove home fantasizing, loving her without pause until I died in her arms. What a letdown heaven would be!

      ‘Going Back to Work’ might work. The high-tech innovations that’re going to create jobs? History shows that technology eliminates them. The future comes to a point where progress only increases unemployment and most of the new jobs will be filled by machines.

      Good thing time travel has been perfected. Want to build Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles? Security plus benefits! How about making typewriters and VCRs? Tip of the iceberg—there’s a huge demand ‘back then’ for blacksmiths and wheelwrights.

      After the sitting President gets drubbed in the primaries, he and his staff decide that ‘Going Back to Work’ just might save the country. Returning to the mid-sixties, with a little bit of luck, he can beat out Richard Nixon.

      Political science fiction? Payback is an empty gimmick.

      But never dreaming about Erica. To have her…Then I caught myself.  Erica had a spirit I could almost feel and longed to touch. If a man’s worth can be equated to how he values a woman, then sleeping with Erica, even if we thermoed a string of supernovae across the Milky Way, would be…anti-climatic. Had to be.

      Huh? A siren, a goddess and a super-model and there’s more to her than that?

      Erica was a person, not a clock; this wasn’t about finding out what made her tick. She had touched that special part of me: the writer I keep thinking I am. A sequence of images created a mystery: What was the metaphor of Erica? What did she mean?

      The telling question: What would be the Erica moment?

      Putting my id on the back burner…

      “God, I wanna wake up with her!” the rest of me declared.

      I’d open my eyes, and sleeping next to me is the most beautiful woman in the world wearing only a sweet smile, still fresh from the middle of the night.

      And when she opened her eyes, I would feel…

      That’s when I knew.

      I was supposed to feel love, glorious, blissful love. Or at least, lucky, right?

      I felt neither. Instead the strongest emotion of all: fear.

      I was afraid that she would open her eyes and see…me! This pompous, pretentious jerk I had become and the frightened little boy I had been all my life.

      I had dreamed of waking up Erica and it was she who had awakened me.

      Was that why I hadn’t asked her for a date or even her phone number? Over coffee, I had told her of my eclectic life, my unique education, my writing adventures…I looked her straight in the eye and she was seeing right through me.

      Erica as ‘Every Woman’? If every woman were Erica, the world would be overturned overnight. Man would be awakened into a new universe.

      She worked on Tuesdays and I went in for morning coffee. Right off, I knew something was amiss. Quickly I understood: Erica was a woman who drew a line around herself and could tell a man when he had stepped over it without saying a word.

      She retreated to the rear of the shop and projected yet another image: that of a bird on an airport tarmac, anxious and frustrated, but unable to take flight. Pretty plumage, but in full flight, I bet she’d be breathtaking.

      Our bodies had not touched in any way. Can you imagine what I would have imagined had I shaken hands with Erica? My heart would have sprouted wings!

      The shop closed for the winter and opened in the spring under new management. I didn’t know Erica’s last name or where she lived. For all I knew, she was married with a couple of kids.

      Hopefully, she’d taken wing for her own special sky.

      I could have found out and pursued her, but the last thing I wanted to do was interfere with her life. Not with the one I was living.

       Truth be told, my first novel was a complete bust. Nobody’s buying it or reviewing it or even reading it. It’ll take a minor miracle for a publisher to ever take a chance on me again.

      “You’re either determined to be a writer,” I’ve told lots of authors. “Or you’ve already written.”

      One guess where I still am, where I’ll always be.

      I don’t have a picture of Erica. Not in my wallet or on my computer screen. I don’t need any. My imagination will be seeing her for the rest of my life. Not disappointed or downhearted, grateful; she had awakened the writer I’m going to be.

      Great books by great writers tell who a woman is and what she can mean  to a man. As much as Erica meant to me, above all, she was a story. 

      Ain’t payback ironic?

      I’ve put my anthology to bed with a ‘waking up’ story.

      Now to that SUPERMAN treatment that’s been killing me for years…

(Also by the author: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1606935887/scifidimensions)