Your Brain on Mustard

and the influence of Monica Drake

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t already, read Monica Drake’s Mustard here. For the complete collection that contains Mustard, pick up The Folly of Loving Life. I spent years trying to find this collection, so you shouldn’t waste a second.

My mom said, “Mmm…mmm… this is how to live” when we were leaving the Aladdin theater. Me in my super Mario pajamas and Mom in Winnie the Pooh sweats, people filed out behind us in bathrobes and lingerie, holding books and smiles into the night.

Monica Drake, God bless her, she gets a nose bleed every time I tell this story, and I’ve told it more times than I can count. The big hope here is that maybe by getting it down proper, I can move on to telling other stories, and spare my heroes the embarrassment, spare me from still looking like a starry eyed teenager who snuck into a party for grown-ups.

That’s the hope.

Back in 2014, my mom smuggled me into an event: Bedtime Stories for Adults, a reading hosted by Chuck Palahniuk, Chelsea Cain, Lydia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake. This 21+ event was to promote Chelsea Cain’s newest novel, One Kick. I wasn’t even old enough to vote. Don’t ask me how Mom got me past the ticket man. All she said before she reached the ticket guy was “be cool.”

Maybe it was my shoulders that got me in. I used to wrestle, and I still boxed and did Jiu-jitsu. What little facial hair I grew came in all patchy. Barely good enough for a goatee.

The auditorium was so packed, people sat on the floor in front of the stage. Just about everyone wore pajamas. Lots of bathrobes, lots of underwear. Some people dressed like they were auditioning for a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

My poor developing teenage brain.

The first to read was Monica Drake. She stepped out onto a stage in a spotlight in front of hundreds of people in a black chiffon gown, dark hair over her shoulder, and began.

Our dad, when he taught forensic science, said it was the art of looking at a problem and tracking backward, analyzing the smallest pieces to find out where things went wrong. When he actually did lab work, it usually involved investigating tampered with or otherwise faulty pre-packed food. He’d analyze unknown objects found in a box of cereal, a can of soup, a carton of orange juice. He’d determine if an item was molding mouse feet, somebody’s fingers lost in an industrial accident, or only an ordinary clump of burned cereal ingredients that had fallen off industrial machinery into the Wheatie-O’s mix.

Already we know this is in retrospect, something to investigate. On top of that, we start to get pieces of authority from the narrator via her dad’s job. Best of all, Monica starts merging the body with food. Like planting a bomb in your brain the size of a grain of rice, so small and subtle you don’t know it’s there until blows.

Gently, Monica uncovers a story about a young teenage girl dealing with a transfer student, college age, living in her house. This older guy, college age really, he’d take up the kitchen early in the morning to make small talk with the fourteen year old narrator, still in her polyester nightgown.

Usually I’d take a dry waffle back upstairs and take a shower, but now this guy was in the kitchen, always making coffee. My parents never got up early, but he did just to make small talk while I was still in my worn-out, polyester nightgown.

That nightgown was so old it was wearing through, nearly transparent. That guy in our house? Suddenly being dressed mattered.

We get this slow drip of details that demonstrate the dynamic between Lu, the narrator, and this new guy in her house. All of them with this new guy subtly creeping in on the narrator’s space. All the more unsettling, the narrator never steps right out and says, “This guy wants me.” It’s all just little hints, mouse feet in the chili.

And he cooks. He fills the fridge with fancy mustards and sausages and weird beers, eating like it’s sex. The buttered bread, the beef bourguignon, even dead rabbit, all bookended with Mmm… Mmm…this is how to live.

Then there’s that big transformation at the end, when the narrator comes home to the college guy slumped over, dead at the kitchen table with his sausage and mustard. Even after she calls her dad, calls the police, calls anybody anybody, she’s still stuck with the body of this man who plied her with food over and over.

That sausage looked so alone. I reached out and lifted it. He always wanted me to try his cooking. I’d turned him down so many times. The sausage was still warm. I wanted to do something right. I put it to my mouth, breathed the steam off the meat. I let my teeth come together around it. When my bite broke through the casing, warm grease ran out, into my mouth. It was a good sausage, full of fennel and pork. I chewed, and swallowed.

As the reader, you’re not a hundred percent sure if you read that right. During intermission between stories, over and over me and my mom, we talked about it, trying to reach consensus.

Some stories are just too big for you alone. That brain bomb Monica planted detonates here.

“Was the sausage his penis she ate?” I asked.

“Oh, for sure,” my mom said.

I had my reservations, all the way up until Chelsea Cain came out and said, “That was seriously fucked up,” and got this big, fantastic roar out of the audience.

Even before I first met her, I knew Chelsea was always right.

This was Friday night. Next day Saturday, Mom makes breakfast.

Can you guess what she makes?

At the breakfast table, for months when Mom cooked, we took turns saying it, that big punchline. Mmm…mmm…now this is how to live.

I spent years trying to find that story. My computer monitor filled with French’s and Heinz and Portland mustards. Even that line, “Mmmm mmmmm… this is how to live.” This was back in 2014, and it wouldn’t be until I was in college that I’d finally find that story. It took forever, but I found that copy and got it signed by Monica, and gave it to my mother, who showed me a way of being, and always offered encouragement in my work.

Ask my mom, and she’ll tell you it’s the best Mother’s Day gift she’s ever gotten.

Things being something else before they become the big thing, there’s more investigation to be had here.

My first published story, Ashtray Divers, little did I know how heavily I was cribbing Monica Drake’s Mustard. A story about a young boy throwing abalone shells into the lake with his older friend. This big green lake with black sticky horrible mud on the bottom, the boy gets trapped by something. Something with smooth arms, the way you imagine a lake monster might have.

This story, like a Rosetta stone teaching more than I knew it was teaching me, another trick I pulled was that repeated, morphing language. Monica’s This is how it live’s to One baby ducky…two baby ducky.

Same as Monica Drake made that sausage into a horrible other thing, I did with this boy having his mouth probed by a lake monster, except it’s not a lake monster. Don’t get me wrong, Monica obviously does it a billion times better, but for my first ever published short story, it’s a good start. And sliding that story past the good-natured eyes of the editors at my old community college? Mmm… Mmm…

There were two other key elements in Mustard that I missed. In Mustard, the story doesn’t end at the big moment. It carries on just a few inches farther with the narrator waiting for the police. The narrator dealing with her dad.

I cut before the fallout in Ashtray Divers. I cut before the big epiphany, where the little boy in my story starts to make meaning of what really happened.

The other big thing, the story in Mustard already taken care of, and told by a narrator in her thirties looking back. That this is a story worth telling because it changed her. One flash forward in particular:

Now I’d guess he’d learned to drink stout that way in England, but back then, I expected it to taste more like a Coke. And when I drank that beer I hated it, but took another drink, and I thought about what the man said—“This is how to live!”—and I didn’t stop drinking for about twenty more years.

These days, Chuck Palahniuk still hammers on me to use Big Voice from a position of a learned person, someone telling the story way later, looking back.

Until next time,

Colton Merris

Next time, we’ll be popping open the hood of Ashtray Divers. Until then visit Monica’s website, monicadrake.com. I always recommend people start with Clown Girl, but the Stud Book is the perfect mother’s day gift.

For a closer look, and opportunities for classes, consider subscribing to her Substack, Words Shape Lives.