By 1988 I had quit writing rock criticism, was working at an advertising agency, and had completed two full length novels. The first, A Shadow Walks, I couldn’t sell and the second, the one I am writing about here, The Positive Touch, I didn’t attempt to sell. Indeed, I don’t believe anybody has ever read it.
I wrote it at the end of a disastrous infatuation with a dead woman: Patsy Cline -it was an imagining of that infatuation in different ways.
I had worked in television for about a year and placed the story in the sales department of TV station in Manhattan.
A man, around 27 years, leaves the army. An orphan whose mother and only family died when he was 5 years old, he returns to civilian life alone and becomes a sales assistant at the station. He works for several sales reps and falls in love with one, a woman, the woman is in love with an abusive boyfriend and dealing with the break up of that relationship.
As the story opens the assistant is very hungover on a Monday morning and resting his eyes in a sales meeting. He is imagining he is in the back seat of a car driving somewhere with Patsy Cline and he is using the image to fuel an idea he has for a story about Patsy Cline.
The assistant answers to a Senior sales assistant who is love with the married Local sales manager.
The story is told in three parts
1. The assistants short story about Patsy Cline and he driving through Montana.
2. In the first person by the sales assistant
3. In the third person.
It takes place over a year. The Sales Rep marries her abusive boyfriend, the Local Sales Manager is a closeted homosexual who contracts AIDS and has to quit his job.
The Sales Assistant becomes blocked on his Patsy Cline story and tries to kill himself because of the Sales Reps wedding but doesn’t have the courage to do so. The Senior assistant says she will kill him if she helps him kidnap the AIDS infected Local Sales Manager.
The day of the Sales Persons marriage she is beaten by her new husband; the two kidnap the LSM and take him to a private house in Connecticut. They strip him, tie him up and the Senior Assistant tries to rape him as “Land Of A Thousand Dances” plays. Then she turns to the Sales Assistant to shoot him and he changes his mind and begins to run away, he hears a shot whistle by him, then another, a third and a fourth are followed by a thud and another thud. He doubles back. They are both died.
He runs and runs through the winding Connecticut roads, and it begins to rain, finally he nears a hotel light flashing and collapses in a ditch. he looks up and suddenly, he remembers being there as a child, his mother holding him and dancing to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” on the radio round and round the bedroom. And that’s how it ends.
The title The Positive Touch is a reference to an album I love by the Undertones and a partial pun on HIV Positive.