George inadvertently introduced me to my last girlfriend Ansel when I was working at Powell’s Books in Oregon. The roast’s timing is nuts because I have a whole essay about it (and a comic take on the place of autobiography in fiction) coming out in the September issue of Gargoyle. But here’s the basic story:
George sent Ansel into the bookstore for a copy of the 2005 Atlantic Summer Fiction Issue. I was endlessly grateful because I assumed he was playing matchmaker, but he swears the magazine-finding mission wasn’t some cunning social engineering. He’d simply used her name in the short story “Director’s Cut” in that issue and figured I’d give her a copy. I’d met him once before when he was reading in Portland. Now whether Ansel and my ensuing romance was the unexpected fruit of a professional fibber’s benevolence or the dramatic complication of one author’s real-life game of character chess no longer matters, because meeting Ansel changed the course of my entire life, for the better.
Ansel had interned at the Oxford American where she helped fact-check George’s piece on hangover cures for the Food Issue. In their brief email exchanges, George, like any respectful gentlemen overexposed to California’s famous photographer, had assumed Ansel was a he. When he called her Mr. Elkins, she shot back, “It’s Miss to you.” Struck by her sass and the matching force of her unusual name, he tagged the mom character ‘Ansel’ in that Atlantic story, which became chapter fourteen of his latest novel, Work Shirts for Madmen. Her payment: a free copy of the magazine.
“Go to Powell’s,” he told her, “ask for Aaron Gilbreath, and tell him to give you a copy.”
Finding this out later, I was grateful George hadn’t sent the whole cast of “Director’s Cut” into the store, otherwise I would’ve been handing out magazines to the real-life namesakes of the characters Raylou, Harp Spillman, dry drunks with fused elbows named Vollis, Evan and Kumi, and some wife of an Irish Traveler named Flora Gorman, and we wouldn’t have had a leaf of paper left in that 68,000-square-foot building.
Someone paged me to the front desk over the store intercom, and when I arrived, this fragrant, shapely, delicately freckled beauty with a black peacoat and a mop of Betty Boopish ringlets said, “George Singleton told me to pick up a copy of the Atlantic.”
A surge of butterflies rushed my tightened chest like unmetabolized LSD suddenly released from my spinal cord. I blinked hard, fearing this woman was the first of what might be many debilitating acid flashbacks. Before she answered my garbled question about the Singleton reference, I released a dumb “Uhhhh,” introduced myself even though she knew my name, then tripped on my own foot while leading her to the magazine rack. Of course I bought it for her. With my employee discount—I was kind of broke. She suggested we go out for barbecue, and we scribbled each others’ numbers on magazine subscription cards that had fallen on the floor. When I emailed George to thank him for “accidentally” introducing me to this talented, bright, line-dancing, bbq-eating poet, he said, “You owe me buddy.” I agreed.
She and I fell in love, moved to New York together, traveled around the South, spent Christmas at Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo, broke up, and remain close friends.
Years later, George sat down on the steps with Ansel and me for a while and talked. I hadn’t seen him since Powell’s two years earlier, and to my surprise, he recommended I write an essay about how Ansel and I met. I told him I’d never considered it because I wasn’t sure he’d want me dragging his (I won’t say good, but) name him into my weak writing—seemed rude to use him as material.
“No man,” he said, “go right ahead. Then you can interview me and I’ll tell you a bunch of lies.”
—Aaron Gilbreath, writer and essayist
Photograph by Christina Storozkova.
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