Stories in the Key of C Minor is a book of six stories, all of which start within a five-mile radius of 350 5th Avenue, the address of the Empire State Building, the original "Ground Zero." With this first book of five short stories and one novella, Russell Bittner believes that worlds can be discovered and described in a dewdrop, in a teardrop, in a leaky faucet-and that all that's required is a good magnifying glass, keen powers of observation, and a feel for how language might be made to form a picture in the reader's mind. NYC-fugheddaboud Brooklyn-is home to scoundrels and angels, derelicts and daredevils, high flyers, low flyers and every kind of flyer for every kind of service one human being is able to coerce, cheat, beggar or beat out of another. Russell captures that here in the key of C Minor-the key of melancholy.
REVIEW
Rolling Thunder....
By Benjamin Feldman "The New York Wanderer" (NYC)
(From Amazon.com)
Rolling Thunder comes to mind: thus Russell Bittner's collection, Stories In the Key of C. Minor rivets your attention on the printed page. The storm approaches, there's nowhere else to turn as you grip the arms of your chair and ride the ride he, and nature, take us on.
Present: the very essence of the story-teller's craft. This is the beauty and talent embodied in each of the five stories and novella in this slim volume of awesome craft. From the opening words, you're there, many times squirming to leave the scenes he describes with such passion, the author so knowledgeable, shall we say, about psychoses that run deep in his characters' minds. You turn the pages anyway, knowing you're locked in the room `til the story's end is blessedly there. Then you can't wait to start the next...
Think Poe, conjure Hawthorne, add the internet age: Russell Bittner's a true raconteur, imagining women's inner lives as best a man can, painting characters so vivid, so misfortunately real, you'd swear you're riding on the Broadway bus, smack up against a conversation you'd rather not hear.
I've known Russell as an essayist and New York flaneur. His multifarious skills as a story-teller are evanescent. Riveting, electrifying, this slender volume of immeasurable virtue is a must read. Go pee before you start it (and by the way, arrange not to sleep alone that night).
EXCERPT:
“Brucie, I need work,” she whines.
She says this, mind you, as she reaches out and begins to toggle a long, manicured fingernail back and forth against a small lump of something stuck to the square of my desk calendar. I glance down; see that it’s stuck to a smaller square of blank white space; see that it’s the only thing residing on that small square other than the print of today’s date. The grating of her fingernail—never mind the gesture—makes me want to do the same with my teeth, but I squelch the urge. “Yes, I know. We all need work, Angie. It’s what keeps us happy, healthy, not housebound.” I’d like to think I have a way with words.
“Well?”
“Well, Angie, you know there’s always that one thing you can do—.”
She raises an eyebrow but not her glance from that lump of something brown and unsightly stuck to my calendar. I decide it must be a remnant of yesterday’s lunch—left over from a week earlier and feeding on its own ration of MSG in a small refrigerator I keep humming above the supply closet in the far corner of my office. That same closet is home to a combination copier and fax machine. Times are tough all around.
“Well, don’t blame me for your situation!” I say. “You don’t want to wait tables, cashier or coat-check. You can’t type, can’t file, can’t even manage the phone if it has more than one line. You can’t spell worth a damn—you’ve said so yourself. And you’ve never even tried to balance acheckbook. What do girls like you do if they don’t do that other thing?”
Her eyebrow does an encore.
“You can’t milk cows here in New York, Angie. We don’t have cos except on milk cartons.” I pull, as if in reflection, on my earlobe.
“You could get yourself on a milk carton, you know, but you’d have to go reported as missing. I suppose I could help with that, but we’d first have to figure out my percentage. It’s not my usual line of work.”
“If you were doing your usual line of work, Brucie, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be out doing shoots—runway, catalogue, covers.”
“Angie, Angie, you’re not a cover kinda girl. You’re a Holstei—,wholesome kinda girl. Ya know, farm-bred. Healthy. Robust. Girl next door. Or at least the girl next farm.”
“Not funny, Brucie.”
“It’s the wrong season for catalogues,” I say, now a little tired of toying with her. She’s said “Brucie” three times in the space of thirty seconds, and it’s beginning to annoy me. She’s taking liberties, goddamn it. If there’d been some give in our relationship—as there’s been with my other girls—then I certainly wouldn’t mind a bit of take. But there’s been none. She’s all take and no give, and I’m getting annoyed. The problem is simple: I want something from her and she knows it. What’s more, we both know exactly what it is I want, and she seems to enjoy making that “something” increasingly difficult to get.
“I’m not going that route, Brucie, so forget it. I didn’t work this hard and come all this way just to do what I coulda done in Iowa at twice the price and a third the cost.”
I wonder about her math, about her understanding of the local supply-and-demand, about her knowledge of her own market worth. Also about how “hard” she’s worked to get to where she is and about how “hard” it was to grab a Greyhound from somewhere just nowhere south of Des Moines all the way to Port Authority. Yeah, sure, she also managed to find her way to my office on the eighty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, and that’s worth something. But so have lots of other girls. And those girls have also managed to show something like gratitude, admiration even—if not for me directly, at least for the view. This one hasn’t shown anything but attitude.
“Fine by me, Angie.”
“Fine by you, Brucie,” she says with a sneer, still single-mindedly sticking it to the thing stuck to my desk calendar. We sit in silence a moment as she continues to work at the lump.
Finally, she gets it unstuck; cranes her neck forward; lets go with a little gust of wind. The lump lands in the pleat of my trousers, and I immediately brush it to the floor. The clock on my wall chimes twelve. Lunch, I think. “Whaddya say we go get something to eat?” I ask. Ordinarily, a little lunch with vino might lead to a little something else. Where Angie’s
concerned, however, hope’s a bicycle with no chain.
“Fabulous idea!” she says with what I take to be genuine appreciation.
“Sit-down lunch?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Someplace with a tablecloth and silver?”
“The works.”
“Bruce, you’re an angel! Let me just go powder my nose.”
I understand the expression to be part of her arsenal—like the raised eyebrow. Both quite quaint. I reach into my desk drawer and pull out the key to the ladies’ room, push it across the desk and let my finger remain an instant alongside hers. She doesn’t withdraw immediately, and I think—.
But no, this is Angie I remind myself—and the brief mingle of our fingers is, I know, about as much as I can expect for my offer of a free lunch. While she’s doing whatever she does in the ladies’, I make a quick calculation. There’s a sit-down diner a few blocks away whose specialty is quick, relatively clean, and very cheap. Aspiring cover girl that she is,
she’ll make do with a salad. I’ll be out a coupla bucks, but I don’t mind parting with the cash when I consider that I’ll have her all to myself to think about in those special ways I like to think about my girls. She returns and hands back the restroom key. I step around from
my desk, help her into her winter coat, admire the way her chest heaves forward as she reaches back to find a sleeve. That the top three buttons of her blouse are unbuttoned doesn’t exactly vitiate the view. We leave my office and call an elevator. There are a number to choose from at this level, so our wait—in silence—is short. I stand close
enough to Angie to admire the scent.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” I ask as I crinkle my nose in the air.
“‘Come Hither’,” she deadpans.
“Oh. Don’t mind if I do,” I say—but the smartness of my jest is lost to the excitement of the elevator doors now opening.
Once outside Empire, she seems quite bubbly and eases right into the pedestrian flow. I, myself, normally hate the jostle of bodies on the street. But in this instance, I find I don’t mind at all if a straggler forces me to bump up against one of Angie’s softer parts. She’s apparently so intent on finding a restaurant de luxe, she doesn’t even seem to notice an
occasionally errant elbow—namely mine. In the meantime, I steer her west past Schwab Brokerage Services and Empire Erotica, then finally through the door of the Cheyenne Diner at the corner of 33rd Street and 9th Avenue. So New York, I think to myself. Money, sex, food—all cheek by jowl.
“Hallo—?” is only halfway off her lips when a steamroller of a woman in standard hostess black grabs two menus and scoots us both to a booth. Angie sits; the eyebrow rises.
“You’ll love the selection,” I say to her before she has an opportunity to object, then sink down out of sight behind the two enormous leaves of my menu. She won’t, of course, but that’s a little beside the point. After a couple of minutes, I peek out over the top of my menu to see where she’s headed on the page. I’m not just a little piqued when I realize she’s eyeing the $23.95 prime rib with what I suspect is a vengeance. If my heart wants to believe the rigor of her stare is an attempt at concentration, the cold and calculated glint in her eye tells me otherwise. At this moment, however, some comic relief appears in the form of a waiter. I know I’m looking at one of Manhattan’s myriad of wannabe actors—too pretty to be waiting tables except between gigs when the rent has to be paid and when crating lunch to Manhattan’s millions of hungry mouths is the easiest way to do it. Angie looks up, all cuteness and smiles.
