OBSERVATION and DESCRIPTION, Part I

by Leigh Lundin

Lacrosse Purposes

I found myself sitting in a new fast food restaurant looking through glass at a multi-level kid playroom with gerbil habitat tubes tykes are supposed to crawl through, slides, a basketball hoop, and other structures designed for kids– but not by kids. As I watched, little children– one after another– paraded by on the ledge inside the windows. They circled the room, carefully stepping across inset room corners, crossing the entrance by jumping to a tabletop so they didn’t touch the floor. They slithered past the two story tube-box-slide gizmo, slid behind the support for the basketball goal, and circled again.

The basketball goal was too high for little ones, so one tiny boy climbed in the ball bin where he became an impromptu goalie.

Pretty funny: The restaurant spent several thousands on playground toys and slides, all so kids could ignore the play set and parade around the window ledges.

The reason I was sitting there was to ponder what to write for this column. In my car, I carry an Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and a note pad to work on when I stop for lunch. Focusing wasn’t working today as I watched the children playing, but they gave me inspiration for today’s article.

Birds of a Feather

An hour before that, I’d attended a get-together sponsored by our local Petco that featured Corene Fry, Orlando’s ‘Bird Whisperer‘. From years of working with zoo people, I knew her the instant I spotted her– dressed in masculine clothes, consummately professional, tough but tender– I liked her immediately. She could probably wrestle a crocodile and yet look great in a dress, if she ever bothered to put one on.

The crowd was mostly women. Other than me, there was only one guy who stayed throughout. He’d brought a macaw, which he kept on his shoulder.

Neutrally, he would have been difficult to describe in a novel. Age 19 or 20, he wore a long sleeved shirt and shorts that revealed skinny legs. Wild, hippie hair topped his head. I tried not to stare at his ears. Brass weights the size of hood ornaments had stretched opened loops in his earlobes that could frighten African tribesmen.

In the gap below his lower lip and above his chin, he had a hole. Ulp. I realized he could suck soda through a straw without opening his mouth.

The dude had a barbell piercing through the bridge of his nose and a stud set in the middle of his forehead. How was that attached, I wondered.

Steve explained it to me. Steve (y’all remember Steve from past columns) has seen more metal than your average hardware store. He worked several years as art director for Silver Moon, a body jewelry distributor where girls routinely popped their tops, saying, "Hey, Stevie, wanna see my new nipple vibes?" According to my expert witness, an incision is made through the epidermis and the head of a pin-sized shaft is placed under the skin. Once it heals, jewelry balls and other gadgets can be threaded onto the shaft.

Whew, I feel so much better now that I know that.

The way the boy dressed didn’t raise eyebrows as much as what he said. When he described himself as a "bitch who likes pain," Corene and I exchanged glances, thinking that was more than we wanted to imagine. What really flummoxed us was his anthropomorphizing bird behavior in terms of human sexuality. Listen, dude: Birds don’t get excited if they see you naked and if one grabs your boob, the feathered one isn’t copping a feel.

While most of us bury our eccentricities, he happened to wear his on his sleeve– well, his face, anyway. He wasn’t a bad kid, just different. Birds know these things even when humans don’t.

Writers are most effective either when their observing character has an unusual way of seeing things or they describe a person and let us draw our own conclusions. I want to share some of my favorites.

Quotes

Many of us love the darkly poetic observations of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Long before I started writing professionally, I was captivated by writers’ phrases.

Following are a few of the best, beginning with a one sentence blood-letting arrow that has to take your breath away. These first few are from John Lutz:

I could feel small bones breaking in my heart.

Hammersmith glided over to Nudger with that odd grace of certain fat men, as if floating in a dream… a clumsy fat man with a lean, agile brain.

He punched the elevator button as if it had punched him first.

From the redoubtable Anne Perry:

This time she really did pale; the color blanched from her predatory face leaving the rouge standing on her cheeks, the spot on her left cheek an inch higher than the spot on the right.

The floor was wooden, scrubbed til the planks were worn uneven, nails in little islands humped above, grit driven into the cracks.

Here’s Caroline Graham:

Mrs. Barnaby had set off carrying a basket of good things like a child in a fairy tale.

Her emotions were as tenaciously confined as the swoop of her pouter-pigeon chest.

I find it disconcerting when Patricia Cornwell switches from past tense to present, but there’s no question she’s a classic wordsmith:

Letitia was built like an old Cadillac and had just as many miles and layers of paint… She gave him a smirk as she bent over in a way that exposed her bullet-like headlights.

Disdain creeps around the edges of his voice, as if sensationalism is obscene, and I am subjected to an unwanted image of him making love to his wife. I can envision him fucking with his socks on.

Finally, a little Sue Grafton. We instruct new writers not to stop a story and break into description, but Sue paints a beautiful portrait we can’t help but admire:

She was tall, maybe 5’10 or better in her high-heeled shoes. She was the sort of woman you noticed from the ground up: long shapely legs looking slender in black mesh hose, a short black skirt flaring slightly at the tops of her thighs. She had narrow hips, a flat stomach, and her breasts were pushed together to form pronounced mounds. The bodice of her black outfit was tight and low-cut, her name stitched above her left breast. Her hair was an ashen blonde, pallid under the houselights, her eyes an eerie green, a luminous shade I guessed to be from tinted contact lenses. Her skin was pale and unblemished, the oval of her face as white as eggshell and as finely textured. Her lips were full and wide, the bright pink lipstick emphasizing their generous proportions. It was a mouth built for unnatural acts. … She applied fresh lip gloss, using her little finger, which she dipped into a tiny pot of pink.

… gold hi-lo carpeting, Early American furniture, probably from Montgomery Ward. A painting of Jesus hung on the wall at the foot of the bed. He had his palms open, eyes lifted toward the heavens– pained, no doubt, by Ori’s decorating taste.

What are your favorite lines, both your own and from other writers?