The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life,
the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.
Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.
Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.
(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)
Monday, June 30, 2003 Saroyan Here is the incomparable William Saroyan on the matter of rejection:
"Last night, the last night of February, I read a snide belittling reference to my writing and of course my name was spelled out in full and very neatly, William Saroyan. Something about the most atrocious or spurious rapture of William Saroyan. Think of it. Somebody having the gall to say such a thing about my writing, about me. Dear lady, reader, dear gentleman, leader, that's not right, it isn't right for living folks to put down other living folks, and least of all is it right for any kind of folks whatsoever to put down this writer or his writing. And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why. It is no fun to start getting hints that your writing isn't the greatest, the most real, the most useful, the most helpful, the most entertaining, the most lifegiving, the most death-defying, the most death-delaying writing of this or any other time. But Christ, the competition, have you ever thought of the awful competition, reader, as you sit or lie somewhere eating bonbons and turning the pages of this book, or of any book. The competition is fierce, it is ferocious, and everybody has his own favorite, or favorites, and that means a lot of other writers have got to be left out, or scorned, or belittled. It was the competition that I thought of last night when I read the slur on my name and my writing. Well, there is no other writing anywhere in this living world that is better than mine, and I mean on almost any level, not excluding care about the sound of English being accidentally wrong in an arrangement of words, such as something sometimes somebody and right there, let me tell you, a lesser writer could leap upon just those three words and work steadily for seven years, being encouraged on the way by his agent, a bright lady or a clever man, and then have a clever publisher (part of an oil company, however, for extra millions of dollars for just about everybody) bring it out like the greatest novel ever, and he means ever. Something Sometimes Somebody, wow. And they have the audacity to be snide and sneering about my beautiful writing, using such slanderous terms as the bullshit rapture of himself. That hurts, folks, I expect better than that from the human race. Any rapture I have ever known, any I have ever put in writing, has been straight, not bullshit. People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and I can tell you, and not in the strictest confidence, I can tell you straight out, right outside, right out in company, right out where everybody can hear, it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by dirty dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words on toilet walls or in slick paper magazines read by smart people do kill writers, they do murder writers, they do assassinate writers, and boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some miscalculating or misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them."
6/30/2003 08:42:00 PM |
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Double talk Received the first response from an agent reading the memoirs -- and it sounds like double-talk to me. First, she said she really loved the chapters she read. But then she said she thought she wouldn't be able to find a publisher for it since, after all, I'm not exactly a writer of note. Couldn't she have figured this out before she asked for the chapters in the first place? And, well, isn't this rather the point when you subtitle a book "the education of a marginal writer"? So who the hell knows what she really thought. One down, two to go. Onward.
6/30/2003 04:12:00 PM |
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Parker on Hepburn Here's a memory you won't be seeing on TV this week, Dorothy Parker reviewing a performance by Katharine Hepburn on stage in New York:
"I saw Katharine Hepburn in 'The Lake' last night. Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
Update Back at work on Love in the Ruins, only 20 pages to go in the script, so I should have the draft done this month. Requires tons of work yet, however. But at least I'll have something down to work on. I began in the present tense but recently changed to past -- present sounded too artsy fartsy. Lots of details yet to fill in, and the voice still needs work. But the foundation of the story is well-structured and sound, thanks to working in out first in the screenplay. The next rewrite will be the most fun. Still some groaning going on in this draft.
Also need to get back to the libretto ... maybe will work today on it. Hope to finish that draft in July as well.
Ger's book already "in formatting," according to an email today from the publisher, which really means they double-check the print-ready file I sent them. This should only take a week or two, so I may get my first copy proof in July.
Already thinking about the project to do after Ruins. Not sure -- except I expect to draft it as a screenplay first. I have one in progress, based on my Army experiences -- I may pick that one up, with a short novel in mind in the long run. I like this form -- 150-250 page novels (published pages).
I'm also very excited about getting into earnest rehearsal on Dorothy Parker next week. I have such a great cast, I expect much from them. And we have lots of time to get it together.
I go on jury duty a week from today. An article about jury duty was the first article I sold to Northwest Magazine back in the 1960s, which began a long relationship with the magazine and its editor Joe Bianco. Eventually I wrote over 100 features for them. I haven't been on jury duty again since then.
The Krispy Kreme story "They begin lining up in the cold darkness, hours before the store opens. Some come wearing pajamas, some lug couches and TVs, others bring beer. And when dawn finally breaks and the ribbon is cut, the rabid customers bolt through the doors. Many of them, in what must be an anticipatory sugar rush, scream at the top of their lungs: "Krispy Kreme doughnuts, yowweeee!" Last year it happened in Fargo and Philadelphia and Amarillo and dozens of other cities in North America. This year it will happen in Boston, Sydney, and elsewhere. All for a simple doughnut." Well, I've never had one. And I can't imagine standing in line for a donut. But one opens here soon, so maybe I'll get my first taste. Access article now.
6/30/2003 06:12:00 AM |
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What is irony? "The end of irony would be a disaster for the world - bad things will always occur, and those at fault will always attempt to cover them up with emotional and overblown language. If their opponents have to emote back at them, you're basically looking at a battle of wills, and the winner will be the person who can beat their breast the hardest without getting embarrassed. Irony allows you to launch a challenge without being dragged into this orbit of self-regarding sentiment that you get from Tony Blair, say, when he talks about "fighting for what's right". Irony can deflate a windbag in the way that very little else can." Reflections by Zoe Williams. Access now.
My death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Like most writers, I’ve written a bit about death. Two of my protagonists, in the play Famililly and in the novel Emmett’s Gift, are older men dying of cancer who decide to take their own lives. Here is Emmett, hanging himself in the barn behind the farmhouse in which he rents a room:
He stood very still on the ladder with the rope around his neck. An observer might have assumed he was having second thoughts but he wasn’t. Emmett was reflecting on his good fortune, his good life. He had enjoyed both of his careers and had been able to share them with a good woman, a wife who had been his best friend. When all seemed lost and his life was slipping away, Shandy had appeared, giving him not only intense pleasure, the memory of which still energized him, but renewed courage as well, courage to take control of his life again and to die with dignity, just as he was momentarily prepared to do. Emmett felt lucky for his life. He had experienced Eros, Fidelia and Agape. He had no regrets. Well, one. But in a way he was settling the score now, making up for his failure to put a bullet in Mary’s brain.
A horse whinnied. High in the barn an owl hooted. Somewhere far in the distance a truck shifted down its gears.
Emmett kicked away the ladder, feeling like the happiest man under the stars.
In Famililly, George’s death is more weary than Emmett’s, in response to changes in the world that he does not understand:
GEORGE: You get to be my age, you look back for what went wrong. What happened to the traditional American values? You used to go out and work hard for what you wanted. You used to get married for life.
Well, I fault ourselves. I fault the kind of parents we became. We tried to save our kids from going through all the hardships we went through, and that was a mistake. We had the experience of standing in soup lines during the Great Depression, of being bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor — you don't forget experiences like that. They become rooted in the fabric of your being. Because those experiences are clear, they are without ambiguity.
When a foreign country makes a surprise attack and sinks your navy, you don't get lost in rhetoric about whether war is right or wrong — you roll up your sleeves and get to work. You do what has to be done to defend your country. Everybody pitches in and works together as one big American family.
Maybe you have to suffer to learn these things, and when parents of my generation started protecting their children from going through the hard times that we went through, we ended up doing them a disservice. We spoiled them, is what it amounts to. We gave them the idea you could get what you wanted without working for it, that the world was some kind of play thing for their personal and selfish amusement. Our children never learned how to pitch in and work together, all they looked out for is number one.
When's the last time you heard of a marriage staying together for the sake of the children? Something like that is unthinkable today. Community and family values have gone down the drain.
(A pause.)
GEORGE: Well, there's nothing I can do about it. It's not my world any more. The thing is — and this is sad in a way — it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to think about throwing in the towel. Because I just don't understand America any more.
Since outliving all my close male friends of my own generation, I’ve found myself thinking about my own death. I, too, want to be cremated, despite my belief that cemeteries are useful institutions for the living. If Harriet chooses to, she can get a plaque from the military and set it wherever she wants. I assume, of course, that she will outlive me. She should. She’s lived a healthy life, and I abused my body in a major ways for over half my years. Yet the gods are always full of surprises, and maybe the last surprise they’ll give me is to outlive my wife.
I want my ashes put at least two places: with Dad in the Shakespeare Garden and with Dick at the top of the White Bird grade.
The worst thing that could happen to me is to lose the ability to write but to remain alive. I can’t imagine such a life. Indeed, I think I would make every effort to terminate such a life. Writing is so much a part of my being that I can’t imagine existence without it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll be able to write mentally even though I can’t literally write anything down.
I’m not sure I want to drop dead as my parents did. At the top of my literary archive in the University of North Carolina’s Ibiblio Collection is the title: Charles Deemer, 1939 - ? Perhaps the most fortunate alternative of all would be to be able to write in the closing date myself. To know I was going to die and so to take care of business, consciously and deliberately. To experience death as experience, not as an accident.
I wonder how many years of writing I have left. If the gods give me ten more years, perhaps I can finish everything that currently is on my plate. By then, of course, new ideas will have occurred to me. But I’d be happy to finish the books I already have in mind.
In any case, I don’t need new experiences. If I lived to write past 100, I wouldn’t be finished writing about the experiences I’ve already had. In this regard, Harriet is much more open to new experiences than I am, always eager to travel and discover new things. I am the opposite. What I want, what I require, is peace and quiet and stability, so I can focus and write and make sense of the experiences I’ve already had. The end of my life is like one long meditation, eventually shaping words into forms that finally give meaning to everything that has happened to me. I can’t think of a swan song that better suits my character.
6/30/2003 05:58:00 AM |
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Sunday, June 29, 2003 A new record! Well, over 1000 folks sang "This Land Is Your Land" for over an hour, and according to our hosts this is a new record for the Guinness Book and documentation is on its way to London. I felt more good vibrations in a downtown Portland event than I've felt since the original Artquake over 20 years ago! I was honored to take part.
6/29/2003 03:47:00 PM |
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The Globe Theater burned on this date in 1613, during a nighttime performance of Henry VIII, a play by the Globe's most famous author, William Shakespeare.
George Ellery Hale, American astronomer and developer of the Hale telescope, was born on this day in 1868. I went to a grade school named after him.
On this day in 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, which created the system of expressways that now links the population centers of this country. It was one of the most ambitious building programs ever conceived.
On this day in 1980, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadotir as president, making her Europe's first democratically elected woman head of state.
Sunday Today I do the Guthrie the gig, the short reading to begin the (hopefully) 3000 guitar chorus doing "This Land Is Your Land." Looks like good weather. Wonder if that many guitar players will actually show up. I think they plan to sing for an hour. Wonder how many new verses will be created. Guthrie's original radical verses, of course, are seldom sung any more except by folkies now and again. Verses like:
As I was walkin'
There was a sign there
And on the sign said
No Trespassing
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'
That side was made for you and me
Or:
One bright sunny morning
In the shadow of the steeple
At the Relief Office
I saw my people
As they stood hungry
I stood there wondering
If God Blessed America for me
Guthrie's original title, in fact, was God Blessed America?
Guthrie lived long enough to hear folkies start singing his songs and generally he hated the kind of "fancy" musical treatment the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary gave his music. He would have hated more the musicals that have sprung up around his music. He wrote clearly that he believed in honest, no-frills, straight-forward dellivery of his songs so the lyrics came through.
I feel the same way about jazz singers. Too many use a song as the excuse to demonstrate their vocal acrobatics. I like the straight-forward singers like Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles, where phrasing and tone are the tools, not vocal histrionics. But this brand of singer appears to be a dying breed.
6/29/2003 08:02:00 AM |
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Ger's death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
My best friend in Portland, Ger Moran, also died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. My personal experience with cancer has not been encouraging.
I met Ger in the mid-1980s. He’d recently come to Portland to change careers and to be near his girlfriend, who was a theater fan and a particular fan of my work. When she recognized me sitting at an adjacent table at a sidewalk café one afternoon, she got Ger to introduce them.
Ger had done some acting in San Francisco and was a great theater fan himself. We immediately hit it off. I introduced him to the regulars at Seafood’s and Nobby’s, and he became an occasional frequenter of the bars, where we’d always talk some more.
Ger became my closest friend next to Crooks. Interestingly enough, when I finally had the opportunity to introduce my two closest friends to one another, they didn’t get along at all. Crooks thought Ger was a phony for wearing an ascot, as he often did, and probably gay besides, which was a pejorative term when Dick gave it a certain inflection (even though Dick did have gay friends), and Ger thought Dick was a blue-collar ruffian and a phony for his barroom stories, which Ger didn’t believe even though I knew for a fact that many of them were true. I didn’t try to become a peace maker and instead enjoyed each as my friend, never again making the mistake of bringing them together.
Ger and I became closest after Dick’s death when Ger moved downtown close to Portland State University, where I taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’d meet at least one of those times for coffee before my classes. Ger had been laid off in his late fifties and had had a hard time finding employment since then, finally taking an early retirement at 62. Then everything began to break his way. He found a wonderful downtown apartment where part of his rent was subsidized, which allowed him to live fine on social security and a small retirement benefit. He started writing poetry again and was given a poetry column in his apartment building’s monthly newsletter. He took an interest in dating again after a disastrous, brief marriage to an alcoholic, a city hall ceremony Harriet and I had witnessed. He even quit smoking. Life was looking good.
One a Thursday afternoon over coffee, Ger told me he thought he might be coming down with the flu. He’d neglected to get his flu shorts. Maybe he should go up to the V.A. hospital and get them. He decided to see how he felt after the weekend. I told him if he needed a ride to the V.A. on Monday, to give me a holler.
I didn’t hear from Ger on Monday so figured everything was fine. On Tuesday he called me from the intensive care unit at the V.A. hospital. On Saturday he had fainted in his apartment. They’d found lung cancer that had spread to his brain.
The outlook wasn’t good. They tried a week of chemo, which changed nothing. In less than a month, he was gone.
Ger had spread his mother’s ashes in the same Shakespeare Garden where I had spread part of my father’s ashes. This is where Ger wanted to be as well. His sister and stepfather, some friends (including Zeena) and I all went up and had a brief ceremony, during which I read several of Ger’s poems. Then we spread his ashes.
I helped his sister clean out his apartment and found much more writing than I was aware of. In the early summer of 2003, I assembled and edited a book called Midnight Cabaret: The Writings of Ger Moran.
Ger was a student of eastern philosophy and took his fate well. “It’s all in the hands of the gods,” he told me while he was still cogent. He lingered on for days with no ability to communicate before his sister asked my advice about removing the life support systems. As it happened, after Dick’s sudden death, Ger and I had talked at length about this, and both agreed that we wouldn’t want life support systems keeping us alive just for the sake of some kind of official life. Quality of life concerned us more than quantity of life. When his sister learned this, she made what I, the doctor and Ger’s friends considered to be the right decision, although it remained a very hard decision for her to make.
So now I have two loved ones in the Shakespeare Garden. It’s the closest thing to a family plot I have.
6/29/2003 07:00:00 AM |
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Saturday, June 28, 2003 Happy birthday, Luigi Pirandello! Winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, best known for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Erratic blog Publishing this blog is still an erratic affair. Sometimes the editor works fine, sometimes not. For example, the memoir excerpt today published fine but the next two posts did not. When the editor doesn't work, however, I've found another way to publish -- so maybe I'd better leave well enough alone. I used this "backup" method to publish these last two posts and bring the blog up to date.
6/28/2003 07:40:00 AM |
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Tired of telemarketers? Here is a do-not-call registry for various states. Access now. I've been on the Oregon list since it began -- and it works.
6/28/2003 07:02:00 AM |
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Dick's death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Each of my parents died instantly. There may be no better way to go.
Dick Crooks died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Shortly before the diagnosis, he’d visited us in Portland, and he was in worse shape psychologically than I’d seen him before. Sobriety did not seem to be agreeing with him.
On the drive home to Idaho, one of his legs swelled. A doctor in Lewiston didn’t know what to make of it, so Dick went to the V.A. Hospital in Spokane. This is where he was diagnosed with cancer, which was in his pancreas and already was terminal. There was little to do but make him as comfortable as possible for the end.
I was very close to Dick’s mother, Esther. She was a short woman, under five feet, with red hair that turned silver as she aged. Feisty and funny, she’d grown up in logging camps and bars and took no shit from anyone. She was very active in Democratic politics in Clearwater County and for a time served as Orofino’s mayor.
The first time I met Esther, during a trip when Dee and I drove up to visit Dick in Moscow, where he was attending the University of Idaho after getting out of the Army, we’d gone to Esther’s house in Orofino for dinner. I found the address and knocked on the door. When it opened, I looked down to find this short woman grinning up at me. “So you’re fucking Deemer,” she said. This was Esther.
Esther took Dick’s death harder than anyone. She had been only a teenager when she’d had him. Dick was her only child. She talked about how it wasn’t right for a parent to outlive her children.
Dick was moved from the hospital to a hospice in Moscow. I visited him with his two sons, Brad and Kass, and it was clear he didn’t have long to live. He was rapidly losing coherence but while he was still able to communicate I told him I loved him and then kissed him on the cheek. Dick smiled and said, “Lovely.” This was the last thing he said to me.
I returned home and a few weeks later he died. I went back to spread his ashes with Esther, his two sons, and a cousin of Dick’s who was especially close to the family. We spread them at the top of the steep grade descending to White Bird, Idaho, above the Salmon River, where the Crooks family roots were.
Because Dick was a veteran, Esther had a simple memorial plaque made, which we set in cement in the White Bird cemetery just out of town. I like being able to visit it, not only to stop at the top of White Bird grade where we scattered the ashes in the summit wind that never seems to stop, but to drive down to the small town graveyard and stand at his plaque, reading his name, engaging his memory. Like most institutions that exist in this life, we have cemeteries because we need them.
Dick’s spirit lives on in his sons and in me. Brad has continued the mortgage business that his father started. Kass wrestles with the same demons that haunted Dick. I would not be who I am had Dick and I not become soul brothers. Each of us carries a little bit of Dick Crooks around with us every day.
Sometimes I wonder if my spirit will live on in anyone after I’m gone, but I can’t think of anyone so I think of something more pleasant.
6/28/2003 06:56:00 AM |
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Friday, June 27, 2003 Islam Under Siege Ahmad Faruqui reviews a new book by Akbar S Ahmed.
"The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are being squeezed between two equally strong forces. On the one hand are the forces of the West that want to modernize them, if need be through regime change. On the other hand are the forces of Osama bin Laden who want to de-Westernize them, if need be by wrapping their women in dark flowing robes. The pain is being shared equally by the two-thirds of the Muslim population that lives in Muslim countries, and who are often governed by tyrants that suppress all independent scholarship and dissent and the one-third that lives in non-Muslim countries, where even some of the longest standing democracies are rapidly regressing toward tyrannical control over their Muslim minorities." Access now.
6/27/2003 10:00:00 PM |
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Guinness Book of Records Steve Einhorn and his wife, Kate, folksingers and owners of the local Artichoke Music, hope to set a record this Sunday by assembling two or three thousand guitar players at downtown Pioneer Square to sing "This Land Is Your Land." This is a benefit for Sisters of the Road Cafe. Einhorn, who saw my Woody Guthrie show some twenty years ago, has invited me to open the affair my reciting these lines of Guthrie:
"I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you're just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody, no good for nothing. Because you're too old or too young, or too fat or too thin, or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard travelin'.
"I'm out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I'm out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and if it's hit your pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color you are, what size, how you are built; I'm out to sing the songs that will make you take pride in yourself. And take pride in your work."
Memoirs I'm about a week away from completing my daily serialization of my memoirs. One way or another -- either commercially or less commercially as a print-on-demand paperback -- It's All Material: The Education of a Marginal Writer will get published.
Done deal Managed to wrap up two projects today: got the review written and off to the magazine; and I finished Ger's manuscript, uploading the print-ready file to the publisher. Good to get those two off the back. Onward.
6/27/2003 03:37:00 PM |
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Projects Here's what I'm working on:
Today I hope to finish a review of 3 books on screenwriting craft for Creative Screenwriting magazine.
Am back to work on my novel, Love in the Ruins, and hope to finish a draft (from the screenplay) by the end of July.
Back at work on my libretto to Dark Mission and also hope to finish it by the end of July.
Should have Ger's book I am editing off to the publisher this afternoon. Am including some sheet music and waiting for composer's notes, due at noon today.
Still waiting to hear about Emmett's Gift, 4 months now at its last-chance publisher.
3 agents have the memoirs; don't expect to hear anything until later in the summer.
Dorothy Parker About ready to begin rehearsal of a tribute to Dorothy Parker I am directing, called You Might As Well Live (access script). This is the best cast I've ever assembled for one of my annual dramatic presentations at the Unitarian Church, and I'm excited about this show. Onward.
6/27/2003 06:46:00 AM |
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Update Woke up this morning -- and the blog is working perfectly again! All morning so far. Knock on my wooden head.
6/27/2003 06:26:00 AM |
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James Agee Profile by Georgia Steinhardt. Access now.
Return of the Weepie "Sixteen years ago, though, and squarely within what most would have reckoned as the Age of Irony, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast took on the apparently narrow and outdated worldview of the weepie and provided an exhilarating sense of what it could teach us. A decade and a half before movies such as Far From Heaven seemed to offer their take-it-or-leave-it option-either solemnly accept these conflicts on their own terms, or patronize the entire project-Babette's Feast opened up a more generous possibility." Article by Jim Shepard. Access now.
6/27/2003 06:11:00 AM |
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Dad's death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Dad’s death – like my UFO sighting while observing sunspots as a teenager and like sitting next to Robert Kennedy’s future assassin when learning of President Kennedy’s assassination – was filled with a sense of the mystical. I tell the full story in my essay “The Weight of My Father’s Soul,” which appeared in Oregon Magazine.
After mother’s death, Dad was beside himself. He moved back to New Jersey to be near his relatives. He never got interested in another woman.
Somewhat selfishly, Bill and I convinced him to move back west in order to be closer to his two sons. We found him a nice room in an assisted living building near Eugene, which also was near Bill, whose life was far more stable than mine. I flew to New Jersey to help Dad settle his affairs and to accompany him west.
I’m convinced that Dad decided to die on the east coast. Here is how I pick up the story in my essay:
What I remember most about that trip are the final minutes of my father's life. We were invited to Gubby's for a farewell dinner, and the drive to his country home was spectacular along country roads lined with the bright oranges and reds of a New Jersey fall. I pulled into the parking area near the secluded house and turned off the engine. Reaching for the door, I felt Dad's hand on my knee.
"I'm sure glad I got to see the leaves change before I go," he said.
This remark haunted me for years. At the time, of course, it made perfect sense in its literal meaning: he was happy to see one final New Jersey fall before moving to Oregon. In retrospect, however, I wondered if he were referring to a different kind of "going," if he were speaking of his own death. After all, in only several minutes after the remark, he would be gone from this world.
Gubby and especially his wife Betty were loving caregivers to my father. They phoned him daily and saw him as often as possible. They'd been concerned, I'd learned, because Chick had been losing a little weight lately, and when we walked up to the house, the first thing Gubby said was, "Chick, I think you've gained back some of that weight."
We entered the kitchen, and Gubby immediately came in behind us with a portable scale.
"Step on this," he said, setting the scale on the floor.
I didn't see what the weight read but Gubby said, "Look, you've gained three pounds!"
They had a weight chart for Dad on the wall, and Betty wrote down the new figure.
Then the scale went to zero. Then my Dad stepped off the scale and without a word headed for the bathroom. Then he fell dead
Apparently the battery on the scale had gone dead just before my father died. But the story doesn’t stop here.
It was late when I returned to Gubby's. I'd been invited to spend the night and accepted, rather than returning alone to my father's apartment several hamlets away.
I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a beer, when I noticed the scale on the floor. I got up and slowly walked to it. Then I stepped up onto it.
The scale registered my weight.
I stepped down and up again. My weight appeared again.
"The battery isn't dead," I said.
Gubby and Betty came forward, and each stepped on the scale. It was working perfectly.
"Why did it register zero?" I wondered aloud.
Somewhere I'd read that, according to some ancient superstition or wisdom, the soul left the body at the moment of death. Had the scale registered the departure of my Dad's soul from his body, only moments before he came crashing down onto the bathroom floor?
It's a ridiculous possibility, of course, and one that still haunts me.
One thing Dad did after Mom’s death is often tell me he loved me. I told him I loved him, too. Don’t wait, he said, because one day it might be too late. Apparently he hadn’t told this to Mom as often as he felt he should. Indeed, from my perspective, their marriage was not a particularly happy one after he became a civilian but particularly after his stroke when, according to mother, he became less social and less active. She once told me that Dad was “a great date and a lousy husband.” Still, she stayed with him long after her two sons had left the house, long after she’d completed her obligations as a mother.
I remember them happy in Pasadena. They went out a lot, and they had a lot of friends. Friends often filled the house for canasta parties. In Medford I only knew them on visits and increasingly (especially after Dad’s stroke in the early 1970s) they bickered or, more commonly, stopped listening to one another. Sometimes visiting them would be almost surrealistic, as each would converse with you without paying any attention to the thread of the other conversation.
Yet Dad had a hard time living without her. After she was gone, perhaps he realized how much he loved her. Dad and I did not talk as intimately as mother and I did, but once he told me that he had never been in love with another woman or ever cheated on Mom. I suspect he must have had sex with prostitutes or someone else during shore leaves in the Navy. I suspect he must have known about oral sex to ask mother to perform it. But in his mind this was not cheating, and he loved her more than he was able to tell her while she was alive.
I like to remember my parents as they appear in the home movies, laughing together during a block party in Dallas, or embraced in front of a Christmas tree in Pasadena. They were married when it was fashionable to endure marital problems for the sake of the children, and I have no doubts that my childhood was happier than it would have been in our modern age when parents think of themselves first and their children second. There is something to be said for parental sacrifice. Of course, this is not a theory I practiced. Far from it. But I admire and thank my parents for providing a stable home full of family activities and joy.
Dad, like Mom, was cremated. I put a part of his ashes in the creek in the park in Milford. Part I gave to Bill, who scattered them in the Willamette River near Eugene, and I scattered the rest in the Shakespeare Garden in Washington Park, which overlooks the Portland skyline. I wanted to scatter part with Mom’s ashes but by this time her fishing hole was nowhere to be found.
I miss not having a parental gravesite to visit. Even visiting the Shakespeare Garden is not quite the same thing as standing at a gravestone and reading a name carved in stone. Cemeteries exist for the survivors.
Dick’s mother knew this. When she learned that Dick wanted to be cremated, she made sure he got the best of both worlds.
6/27/2003 06:05:00 AM |
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Thursday, June 26, 2003 Aren't we clever? I think I discovered a very, very convoluted way to publish my blog -- too much work but it will do until the "company" gets its act together. We'll see. Onward.
6/26/2003 10:38:00 PM |
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The nightmare continues Well, 2 folks who tried to help me so far haven't been able to. Is the 3rd time the charm?
6/26/2003 07:00:00 PM |
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Happy birthday, Charles Messier! Anybody know who Charles Messier is? He catalogued star clusters, nebulae, and other objects in space, and amateur astronomers learn to identify these objects by their "M" or Messier numbers.
6/26/2003 07:59:00 AM |
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Toward a personal philosophy [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Sobriety has brought me many gifts but perhaps the greatest has been a reintroduction to myself, to the self that got sidetracked in the Army when I learned that I had an abnormal capacity for alcohol and used this to pursue the social life I thought I’d been missing. Sober, I’ve learned that I’m reclusive by nature and that there is nothing wrong with this.
As I approach retirement, I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on my life and on the meaning of life in general. This memoir is a product of some of this energy. Today I’m able to articulate my belief system with greater clarity than ever before, even though I considered myself something of a barstool philosopher when I was drinking. But in those days, I was pontificating. Now my beliefs inform my actions, not my tongue.
Every experience I’ve related in these pages has influenced my philosophy of life. But I’ve purposely delayed sharing several important influences until now. Among these are the deaths of four people I loved.
Most people who knew my parents believed that my mother would outlive my father. Dad, after all, had had a stroke in his early sixties. Women, in general, outlived men. There was no reason to believe that Mom would die first.
There certainly was no reason to believe her days were numbered when she was scheduled for a routine rectal operation. I talked to her on the phone from Maryland the day before she checked into the hospital and teased her about her condition. I knew she would consider this particular kind of operation very “unladylike.”
We were always teasing Mom. She was the perfect person on whom to play a practical joke because she was so gullible. Dad set up the most involved traps for her, and his greatest practical joke of all was the night of the Willapoo.
Carol and I were visiting them in Medford. One hot summer night we were sitting around the kitchen table playing pinochle. Carol and I, of course, also were drinking cold beer. There was a large round thermometer on the patio, visible through the window, and the temperature was still in the 90s after nine at night. Mom, who hated heat, couldn’t stop complaining about the weather.
During a break, Dad took me aside and told me to keep Mom occupied when she came out of the bathroom until he gave me a signal to return to the kitchen table. I knew something was up and agreed.
We were back to playing cards when Dad suddenly shouted, out, “Oh my God, Flo, look! It’s a Willapoo!”
He was pointing at the thermometer outside – which now was registering only 60-odd degrees! Mom rushed outside, and we all followed her. Immediately her face lit up, and she started dancing across the patio, saying, “Feel how cool it is! This is so nice!”
Carol almost fell into the trap as well, mentioning that it did feel cooler. Dad explained that a Willapoo was a rare atmospheric event that happened only once every 250 years when the such-and-such and the so-and-so collided to cause a low pressure trough that pulled cold arctic air into southern Oregon.
Finally we went back to playing cards. Mom was no longer miserable from the heat. At the next break, I took Dad aside and asked him what was up. While I was keeping mother occupied during the previous break, and while Carol was in the bathroom, he had taken out some ice and held it on the thermometer until the temperature dropped. He had caused a Willapoo.
The temperature finally climbed to the high 70s again, and before the night was over Dad gave in and told Mom the truth, as he always did. She said, “Oh, Chick,” as she always did, and the matter was forgotten until the next time Dad had an audience to whom to tell the story.
I was very close to my mother. She told me things she told few other people. Once she told me how shocked she was that Dad had asked her to perform fellatio. “What kind of a woman does he think I am?” she wondered aloud. This speaks not only to the prejudices of her generation but to the intimacy of our relationship. I never missed sending her flowers on Mother’s Day or her birthday – except on one occasion, which she never forgot. I was raised by her, of course, while father was at sea, and for six years there were just the two of us. This formed a special bond that lasted all our lives.
In my office at home is a photograph of us, taken when I was about three, and both of us have bright eyes and broad smiles, mother with dark hair, pretty, myself silvery blond, cute, the pair of us looking like the two happiest people in the world, the bond of mother and son. When she was gone, I missed her terribly.
Mom dropped dead in the hospital lobby as she and Dad were checking out the day after her operation. The operation had gone well. Then my mother’s heart short-circuited, and she died instantly before she was able to walk out the hospital door.
I was stunned when I heard the news. I flew from Maryland to Oregon immediately. I drank through most of the long flight, thanks to an understanding stewardess who sympathized with me and let me buy more than my limit of liquor. I was pretty drunk by the time I stepped off the airplane. Mom was cremated and her ashes spread in the Applegate River at her favorite fishing hole. A few years later a dam project flooded the area, and the fishing hole disappeared.
6/26/2003 05:56:00 AM |
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Day 3 Still no visible progress in getting my blog fixed. The only way I can update it is to ftp to blogspot.com, open the source for the index.html file, change the file, save it, and ftp it back to replace the original one -- in this way, I do manage to continue the serializing of my memoir. But what a drag. Meanwhile, the Pro publishing tool appears to work fine on my end, all my normal posts appear to be saved, but nothing is getting published. 36 hours without any word from "blogger control," which is the help institution here. Patience, patience! Wish they had a goddamn phone number for assistance.
6/26/2003 05:52:00 AM |
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Wednesday, June 25, 2003 Frustration! End of day 2 of my blog publishing problem. Very frustrating -- mostly since I haven't heard from anyone for over a day, when a fellow wasn't able to help me. Customer service here isn't at the speed of light. Patience! I tell myself. Not always easy. This is a great site when everything is working but when it isn't, well, a good deal of patience is required.
6/25/2003 06:29:00 PM |
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Keeping the faith My editing tool here at Blogger (Blogger Pro) is working fine, and from my end everything appears to be getting published. In the split screen environment, the bottom record of the blog looks perfect. Only nothing is getting published at the website. So I'll continue here in the editor as if nothing is wrong, keeping the faith that once the bug is fixed, everything will go online and we'll be back to normal. We'll see!
Meanwhile, I am using ftp to add new installments of my memoir as a temporary fix for my readers until this situation is fixed.
6/25/2003 08:23:00 AM |
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Mom, apple pie and ... Potato salad! Especially for the 4th of July and other summer picnics. I belong to the traditional, keep out the fancy stuff, school of potato salad. Here is an all-American recipe I approve of. All-American Potato Salad.
6/25/2003 08:19:00 AM |
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Sobriety [from a memoir in progress, which started on 4/13/03]
I loved sobriety. I loved waking up without a hangover. I loved how much better I felt physically and mentally. For a long time, I still missed a few things about drinking, especially its ability to distract myself from immediate stress, but one thing I didn’t miss was hanging out with my drinking buddies. Even what I missed about drinking was its private moments, not its social ones.
Dick Crooks’ adventure in sobriety was very different from mine. Dick behaved as if he hated sobriety. He said he loved it – but he was always grouchy and on edge about something. Drinking, he could be positive to a fault, but sober he became someone who would find something wrong with everything. He had loved jazz and blues all his life but went as cold turkey on music as he did on booze. He couldn’t listen to Billie Holiday or anyone else without it bringing along memories of drinking, and so he stopped listening to the music he loved.
Typical of this change was something he said during our last visit before he was diagnosed with cancer, passing away very quickly after that. We were driving somewhere or another and were stopped at a traffic light. A middle-aged man was crossing the street. There was nothing particularly noticeable about him that I could see. But Dick suddenly observed, “Look at that asshole. Who the fuck does he think he is? Jesus Christ. This fucking world, man.”
When I asked him what he meant, he either didn’t hear me or chose not to expound on the subject. I let it rest. But this was typical of his change in attitude, from a man who frequently laughed, who could crack a joke under the most stressful circumstances, to someone who verbally attacked strangers passing in front of his car.
Since Dick lived such a short time sober, I’ve often wondered if sobriety was even a gift to him at all. Then I remember what he told me about his last days of drinking, alone in his apartment, buying cheap wine because it’s all he could afford – this wasn’t much of a life either. I just wish he could have experienced more of the joy of sobriety.
As I write this, I am one month and two days away from ten years of sobriety. I don’t make a big deal of milestones like this because I know how fragile sobriety is. I hope I never forget. In treatment, I met a woman who had relapsed after almost eleven years of sobriety. She had remarried and built a new life. No one knew about her life as a drunk, except from her stories. They had never witnessed it.
One night, to celebrate something special, she had a single glass of wine with her husband at dinner. She turned down a second glass and didn’t miss it. This worked so well that she began to have a glass of wine with dinner more often. After a week without problems, she allowed herself to have a second glass of wine with dinner. This was all it took. Within a month, she was drinking a fifth of vodka a day again.
I hope I never forget the conversations I had with this woman. I hope I never forget the awe in her voice as she told her story, as if she had become possessed by some demon greater than herself. This is the sense in which the alcoholic becomes powerless over alcohol.
At the same time, I must go back to what I learned from my reading in the medical library. There are abusers of alcohol who have learned to drink responsibly. There is always the danger, therefore, of anyone aware of these studies deciding that s/he, too, is the exception.
Since I was a binge drinker, since I most enjoyed drinking when I was drinking to excess, I do not believe that I am one of those people who will ever enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. I assume alcohol is out of my life forever, and I remind myself of this as often as necessary.
6/25/2003 06:48:00 AM |
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Tuesday, June 24, 2003 What a mess Blogger moved to a new server, I guess -- and it's a NIGHTMARE!!
6/24/2003 11:15:00 AM |
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The Pledge Rewatched this 2001 movie last night, based on a novel by Durrenmatt, directed by Sean Penn, with Jack Nicholson in one of his fine performances. Like it as much as the first time, a lot, maybe more. A taut psychological drama wrapped in a crime story. "Within this peculiar hybrid of European existentialism (Fredrich Durrenmatt) and American Gothic, Sean Penn has produced something that looks like a masterpiece," writes Lawrence Russell in his review (access full review). I would agree.
6/24/2003 06:07:00 AM |
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Doomsday? "Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, 'I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years.' Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on '15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It.'" Greg Easterbrook is more optimistic. Access article now.
6/24/2003 05:35:00 AM |
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Harriet [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’d met Harriet less than two weeks before I entered treatment. Some months before, when I was trying to get sober on my own, I’d replied to several personal ads in a moment of intoxicated loneliness. I’d forgotten all about them by the time I got a response from Harriet, who had written one of the ads. She already had dated several men who had responded to her and apparently was working her way down the list after they hadn’t panned out.
No bells rang when we met for coffee on the day before her birthday. She headed back east to visit her sister, and I entered treatment. To my surprise, she visited me at CARS once we were allowed to have weekend visits.
We began seeing one another as friends. I was thankful to have someone in my life who wasn’t a barfly, as virtually all my friends were at this stage of my life. Harriet introduced me to some of her friends, and I began to get a sense of a social life away from the bar scene, which also was a new experience for me. Harriet, although Jewish, was shopping around for a church to get interested in, and I sometimes accompanied her, which was a very new experience for me. The last time I’d been inside a church other than for a wedding was when I’d pulled chapel duty in the Army.
Then, one night when she invited me over for dinner, the first spark of romance flashed, and our relationship took a new direction. By the time I was ready to graduate from the Dom, we’d decided to live together, and I moved in with her. Four years later we got married.
Harriet provided a solid foundation for my early years of sobriety. She made the transition far easier than it would have been otherwise by giving me a new social world to discover, a companion into activities that I’d ignored for many years or done only within the context of drinking. Without her circle of friends, and her social base, I’m sure I would have ventured back into the only social world I knew, the bar scene, especially at Seafood’s and Nobby’s. If today I can comfortably go to Nobby’s for breakfast and visit with Greg, Millie and others from the “good old, bad old days,” it’s because I’m secure in my sobriety – and Harriet played an important role in helping me attain this security. I’m not sure I could have done it without her.
In the beginning of sobriety, everything was new to me. I, sober, was new to me. I rediscovered the teenage recluse I once was and realized that when not drinking, I was not a very social person at all. I enjoyed my solitude more than I enjoyed company. As I had written in a sonnet, the inside of my head is my country. Sober, I discovered that I liked myself a lot.
As I was discovering this, I also faced a very different challenge. With Harriet, I began something very new to me – a sober relationship.
6/24/2003 05:28:00 AM |
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Monday, June 23, 2003 Cyborger "The Cyborger will tell you what your name would mean if you happened to be a shallow imitation of humanity with a dark purpose." Try it out. When I did: C.H.A.R.L.E.S.: Cybernetic Hydraulic Android Responsible for Logical Exploration and Sabotage.
6/23/2003 04:30:00 PM |
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Whiteness studies "Advocates of whiteness studies -- most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race -- believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race." Article by Darryl Fears. Access now.
6/23/2003 07:57:00 AM |
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Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life "Since it began, Potter-mania has represented a cultural infantilism, that only grows as the years go by. It is about what we expect from our kids, our books, our value system and ourselves. Whatever happens in The Order of the Phoenix, the story of our obsession with Harry Potter is unlikely to have a happy ending." Article by Jennie Bristow. Access now.
6/23/2003 07:48:00 AM |
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The Dom [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Mel was right. I never would have stayed sober going directly from CARS to my apartment. I almost didn’t make it through the three weeks I had to wait before checking into the Dom.
One afternoon, in fact, I bought a six-pack of beer and took it home. I kept staring at it. I took out one can and set it on the table. I kept staring at it. I still had over a week to wait before checking into the Dom. While I was still thinking about whether or not to open the beer, a sober friend knocked on my door to see if I wanted to go for a walk. When I got back, I took the beer, put it back in its sack and carried it outside. I left it in a doorway, a gift to a passing drunk who needed it more than I did.
Life in the Dom was good. I retained my job in the medical library, continuing to educate myself about alcoholism. There were only a few classes during the day, giving me a lot of time to write. I started working on the screenplay that became Recovery. I also made some new friends and shot a lot of baskets on the Dom’s outdoor court. We got passes to go downtown, and I took a lot of walks.
While I was in the Dom, Dick Crooks entered CARS. I couldn’t believe my eyes the day I saw him in the mess hall. I thought he was there to visit me but he was a new patient. I’d written him from CARS, letting him know I was getting sober, and he had written me, telling me he’d decided to get sober, and our letters had crossed in the mail. However, his letter to me had been mailed to my apartment, and I didn’t receive it until some time later.
It was great to have Crooks around. I didn’t get to spend much time with him except at the mess hall until after he graduated from CARS. He decided to remain in the area for out-patient treatment, renting an apartment near the V.A. facility, but in a few months financial needs sent him home to Idaho, where he eventually started a mortgage business in Lewiston, near his home town.
In the meantime, I found someone else to spend time with. I started dating Harriet, who was the head of the Women’s Studies program at Clark College, which was located right across the street from the V.A. facility.
6/23/2003 07:45:00 AM |
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Sunday, June 22, 2003 Health [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
We were walking along, enjoying the day, when I suddenly felt dizzy. I had to sit down to clear my head. Zeena, who worked in a hospital, suspected something or other (a potassium deficiency comes to mind) but made me swear to see a doctor as soon as we got back.
I went to doctors only when I was in pain or worried about something – and suddenly I was worried. Back in Portland, I went to the V.A. for a checkup and learned, to the horror of the doctor, that my blood pressure was something like 240/170. I was put on blood pressure medication immediately.
My doctor gave me a stern lecture about the relationship between my drinking and my blood pressure and my survival – and since I’d admitted to only a fraction of my daily alcohol consumption, she scared me to death. If I was being this reckless with my life based on the lie, imagine how much more I was flirting with death based on the truth. What I was doing was drinking myself to death. This obvious fact was a revelation to me.
I didn’t want to die. My best writing was still ahead of me. I decided to do something about it. I decided to quit drinking.
I decided to quit drinking on my own. Most drunks make this decision first. It took only a few months for me to realize this wasn’t going to work at all. I needed help.
The Veterans Administration (V.A.) had a program that, if I were accepted into it, wouldn’t cost me a cent. It was an intense 28-day in-patient treatment program, followed by months of out-patient care. The program was called CARS, which stood for Chemical Addiction Rehabilitation Services.
Even though the program wouldn’t cost me a cent, I was living so close to the edge financially that I didn’t feel I could take a month off from my freelance writing income. How would I pay my rent if I took a month off? The gods heard the question. Quite unexpectedly, Chateau de Mort got scheduled for a revival in the Pittock Mansion in the summer of 1993. My contract provided decent royalties for each season they performed the play. Now I could admit myself into CARS and come out with a fat check waiting for me. I bit the bullet and applied.
I entered CARS on June 14, 1993, a Monday. The previous Saturday night I went out and got plastered, having one each of every favorite drink I could think of. I wrote about this experience in my essay “Liquor and Lit: A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk,” which was published in Oregon Magazine:
For a nightcap, I ordered a special drink for old times, a farewell toast to a way of life, a moment I expected to remember forever – and have. I ordered a B-52. Its layers reminded me of the different periods of my life – the high school science nerd, the confused mathematician, the Berkeley street person, the linguist-spy-mascot, the ambitious grad student, the less ambitious playwright – each period clearly set apart from the others. When I raised the small, narrow glass and tipped it, the fragile spectrum dissolved as each color ran into its neighbor to become a drab concoction of spirits, suddenly dark and dreary, just as the periods of my life finally had succumbed to one all-encompassing description, which had become more meaningful than any colorful distinctions between them: I was living the life of a drunk. I belted down the B-52, paid my considerable tab, and left.
One B-52 pilot on one final mission. Over and out. (But somehow I lived to tell the tale.)
Upon admittance at CARS, I was assigned a room and a roommate, a counselor, and a part-time job. My counselor was Mel, a no-nonsense former addict with a reputation for taking on the tough cases. To my surprise, I was considered a tough case because I was “a college boy.” Mel told me that the failure rate among those with college degrees was higher than in any other demographic. We thought we knew too much, we’d second-guess everything we were told, we had perfected rationalization to an art form, we were arrogant – all of which would make sobriety difficult for us. I was determined to prove him wrong.
Mel’s no-nonsense approach became the model for the character of the counselor in my screenplay, Recovery, a thriller about an abused woman who tries to hide in a treatment center. Here he is addressing a group who have just entered treatment:
How many here want a drink right now? Or a fix? Drag a weed, snort a coke, shot a Wild Turkey? (No one responds.) You lying sacks a shit. You scumbag assholes. You'd kill your mother for a drink. You'd sell your little sister to a known carrier of AIDS to buy some crack, you'd take money off your grandma's night stand to buy your weed.
The style at CARS was in-your-face and confrontational. Though I rebelled against it just like everyone else, in the end it was just what I needed.
Each morning, we read a proclamation that summarized the CARS philosophy: “Our concept of a meaningful life is not merely to stop drinking or using drugs. It is to replace that part of yourself that caused self-destructive behavior in the first place. … If you're not ready to examine yourself with ruthless self-scrutiny, then you may want to reconsider your reasons for entering this treatment program. You may want to leave before we kick you out.”
My part-time job was in the medical library. As a result, I read everything about alcoholism that I could get my hands on. What I learned didn’t always jive with what I was being told in treatment. For example, in Europe, according to medical journals, a large number of studies had shown that the success rate for getting sober in treatment was no better than for getting sober on your own.
Mel, to his credit, did not chastise me for reading medical journals at work. On the contrary, he started slipping me books that were not part of the official reading list in treatment. Three books in particular became important to me: Under the Influence, Rational Recovery, and Man’s Search for Meaning.
Under the Influence is a scientific disease-model discussion of alcoholism, which coincided with the V.A. treatment approach. Yet the V.A. didn’t approve of the book because of its criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, which also was a cornerstone of treatment. The book did not approve of A.A.’s contention that all alcoholics have a character flaw. In the disease model, this would be like giving a diabetic a character flaw.
As a result, Under the Influence was not even in the medical library! It was as if it had been banned for its small criticism of the holy A.A. Indeed, when Mel lent me the book, he did so surreptitiously, as if he were slipping me forbidden material.
Rational Recovery challenged everything about A.A., including the contention in the first of its twelve steps that the alcoholic is powerless. R.R.’s approach was to empower people to take control over their own lives. This appealed to the existentialist in me. I decided that I did, in fact, have complete control over whether or not I started drinking. After that, after the booze kicked in, I became powerless to stop drinking – but I was in control up to this moment. I always had the free choice whether or not to begin drinking. Rational Recovery supported this contention but A.A. did not.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a philosophical look at surviving the holocaust, written by a philosopher who did. What the Nazis could never change, the philosopher learned, was an individual’s attitude – and this was the foundation for survival and finding meaning in life, even under the most depraved circumstances. This was a lesson I’d learn to put to use in less inhumane environments than the one in which it had been forged.
Because of the books Mel loaned me and my other reading in the medical library, my approach to sobriety became a program based on knowledge. Know the enemy – and conquer it. This, too, rubbed against the approach of A.A., which had an anti-intellectual streak in it, if not in theory at least in practice. “Keep in simple, stupid,” was the retort to anyone who might raise a question or challenge a presumption. I went to A.A. meetings through treatment because I was required to do so, but I became less interested in them. During my out-patient phase, I attended meetings of Rational Recovery and felt much more at home.
An important part of treatment were group therapy sessions. As a result of one such session, Mel again showed creativity in dealing with his “tough case” patient, yours truly.
During one session, in the middle of talking about my daughter, I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying so hard that it was disrupting the session. The next day, when Mel asked me to go on about my daughter, the same thing happened. Mel didn’t want the daily group therapy session to turn into everyone watching me bawl, so he came up with a plan.
He gave me an assignment: every night, from seven to seven-thirty, I was to sit alone in my room and think about my daughter and cry. It was very important that I cry. I was to do this every evening until I had not cried for three days in a row, and then I was to report back to him.
As a result, I cried myself out about my daughter in about a week. What I was crying about, of course, was my failure to become a part of her life. I had no one to blame for this except myself. How hard would it have been to write her or call her every few weeks, to visit her once a year? I’d done none of these things. I had pretended she didn’t exist. In treatment my guilt about this erupted like a volcano.
Once I was able to talk about my daughter in group therapy without breaking down, I told the full story. I also decided to write her a letter and explore the possibility of a future relationship with her. I drafted the letter while I was in treatment, reading each draft to the group, but when it was time to mail it, the address I had was no longer current. Considerable time would pass before I tracked her down – and you know the story of what happened next.
My original plan had been to enter CARS for 28 days, then move back into my apartment with my royalties check and go on with my life. I really hadn’t given much thought to what “go on with my life” meant. Halfway through treatment, Mel forced me to put my plans in writing. When I did, he scoffed at them. Where was I going to spend my leisure time? Who were going to be my friends? I assumed that I’d go to Seafood’s or Nobby’s just as before but sit at the bar drinking coke. I really had made no plans to change my routine, other than to quit drinking. Mel tried to make me understand that my routine was part of the problem, that I needed to find new things to do with new friends, friends who weren’t themselves alcoholics.
This is when he brought up the Domiciliary, which everyone called the Dom. He wanted me to stay for six more months of in-patient treatment, moving into the Dom. Six more months! This was not part of my game plan.
Mel was clever. Seeing my resistance to the idea, he started working on me where I was vulnerable. He began talking about six-months in the Dom as a kind of writing retreat for me, where I could get free room and board while I worked on my next script. Sure, there would be classes to attend and chores to do, but so what? I’d have lots of free time, he said, and I could bring my laptop computer and write. Since when did a writer turn down six months of free room and board?
This was a ploy, of course, but Mel also was on my side. During a meeting in his office one day, he looked me squarely in the eye and shook his head, saying, “What a waste. You have so much to contribute. So much to contribute. What a goddamn waste to spend your time on a barstool.”
I told Mel that if he could get me into the Dom, I’d do it. I’d sign up for six more months of in-patient treatment.
6/22/2003 03:08:00 PM |
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Friday, June 20, 2003 The writer's laptop First, a disclaimer. I own no stock in the company Alphasmart. I'm going to rave about its product because I mean it.
I've talked here before about the Alphasmart 2000, a light-weight laptop word processor that runs for 700 hours on 3 AA batteries. I bought it for myself for Christmas. I use it regularly. I am still running at 96% battery strength!
That's what bugged me about the laptop computer I owned ... 3 or 4 hour battery life. Taking it camping was a drag. It also did a zillion more things than I needed it to do. All I needed a laptop for was to write. The Alphasmart 2000 was the perfect portable writing machine for me. 700 hours battery life and a capacity of about 100 written pages. With a USB connection, I can dump everything on it into Word, my screenplay program, email, or whatever else I bring up on my desktop.
And the price is right, too, a mere fraction of the cost of a laptop.
I see the new model is Alphasmart 3000. I don't know what features have been added. In fact, I can think of no new features I actually need. I hope my Alphasmart lasts forever.
It just might. One reckless day I had it sitting on the passenger seat of our van, in its case but unzipped. When I retrieved it, the case opened and the laptop crashed to the pavement with enough impact that all but two of its key-caps fell off! I was sure I had destroyed it. I retrieved all the caps, snapped them back on ... and with much worry, turned on the machine. It worked fine. It's been working fine ever since. These babies are practically indestructible.
Sonnets & Seattle [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
The sonnets came in a great rush out of nowhere. I never wrote sonnets. Suddenly one appeared in my head when I woke up in the morning, fully formed, and the next morning another one appeared. I seemed to be writing them in my sleep. Soon I decided to see if I could write one while awake and discovered I could.
Because my affair with Zeena was topsy-turvy, as she continued to move between Mike and me, unable to give one of us up for the other, the sonnets ran the full gamut of emotions, from ecstasy to despair. Here are some examples:
The inside of my head is my country.
It does not matter whether trees and lakes
surround me; whether gulls above the sea
adorn my walk; whether sunsets make
the curtain of my day. My own thoughts
are scenery enough. What my thoughts need
is ground. The dazzling dance of thinking, caught
up in itself, can recklessly not heed
anything but its own reward. Mind
for mind's sake is no way to live a life.
I need the space where mind can best unwind.
I need the sheath in which to rest the knife.
I need, darling, for you to come to me.
The inside of my head is my country.
If our lips should never meet again;
if your arms should not around me wrap
in such a way to tell me of your ken;
if our bodies never draw the sap
each from each, flesh to flesh, the way
we've done before in miracles of night;
if it doesn't happen how it may
have been between us if my health was right;
if, I say, all dreams are lost and barn
doors closed; if this should be, my heart of hearts,
do not grieve for us or weep or mourn.
For a brief time we knew Cupid's darts!
Cherish the way women can touch men,
instead of pining for what might have been.
The smallest things demand the biggest heart.
Passion has its place, and lustful screams
that penetrate the silence of the dark
can get two lovers through their lonely dreams.
And then the morning comes, and day is long;
the screams gone, silence fills the room
and what was passion doesn't seem as strong
as when the screams were offered against doom.
But flowers make their gesture toward the sun:
as day is when the bee will come to drink,
so day is when the finest deeds are done,
and day is when the mated become linked.
Screams of passion often have their say -
true lovers bond in silence through the day.
I wrote dozens of sonnets during my tumultuous affair with Zeena. Later I collected 27 of them into a chapbook called The Moods of Love. Zeena was the first woman who inspired me to write poems I later considered sharable, publishable. I have no idea where this energy came from. When we broke up, the energy was gone. I haven’t written a decent sonnet since.
Even the end of our affair was complicated. Zeena finally chose me over Mike but in the meantime I’d made a decision that would not permit us to remain together. I decided to get sober. Zeena, a daily drinker herself, wasn’t ready to quit, which meant that she became a threat to my sobriety.
I used a similar moment in my play Bedrooms & Bars, a play that owes a lot to my affair with Zeena (I even use some of the same sonnets in the play):
QUINN: I've been thinking a lot about what I want, Deadra. The first thing I want to do is get healthy. That requires a lot of change, and sitting in a bar watching you get drunk isn't cutting it. Maybe the person I'm becoming isn't someone you want to be around.
DEADRA: That should be my decision.
QUINN: I can't party the way I used to.
DEADRA: I can't either.
QUINN: You did a pretty good job last night.
DEADRA: It's my birthday, for Christ's sake. So what are you saying? Suddenly you don't want to be around me because I drink?
QUINN: That's part of it.
DEADRA: Then I'll quit.
QUINN: Don't be ridiculous.
DEADRA: I'm willing to make sacrifices here, Quinn. Accommodations. It would be nice to see you do a little of that in my direction.
QUINN: You don't really want to quit drinking, Deadra.
DEADRA: Quit telling me what I want.
I was at a point in my life when I knew that my choice quickly was becoming one between sobriety and death. Ironically enough, I got my first insight about this, which eventually was going to drive Zeena and me apart, as a result of something that happened on a wonderful trip we took together to Seattle.
My first sonnet was about a ferry ride we shared during this trip:
The skyline hangs above the bay, a mist
of mystery as in a dream, and we
stand close upon the ferry's deck and kiss,
and I feel all the world as it should be.
These are moments that my heart holds dear.
When you are near, somehow I am alive
more than I've been, and everything is clear
to me: I know for what I want to strive.
Yet I don't want my love to burden you,
a chain around your heart, presumption of
your time. The things that I would hope to do
for us are full of caring and my love.
I love you for each moment that I have
and ask from you such love as you can give.
I never had the good sense of the persona in this poem (I’ve never had the good sense of any of my better characters). I demanded much more from Zeena than “such love as you can give” and often felt insecure in the relationship. Every time she went back to Mike, I thought it was because I wasn’t good enough a lover for her. Since sex was often the main reason why a woman and I would stay together as long as we did, this felt like a different kind of rejection than I was used to feeling. I didn’t like it.
But all insecurity momentarily faded during a wonderful weekend we spent in Seattle, during which a single episode signaled that it was time to change my life.
6/20/2003 07:24:00 AM |
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Hillary for President? "Despite its status as a crucible of feminism, the US has oddly lagged in producing viable female candidates for the top job — partly because American presidents are also commanders-in-chief and most women politicians (like Hillary) have been overly concerned with caretaking issues at the expense of military expertise. "
Camille Paglia looks at Hillary Clinton's new memoir from an unusual perspective.
"On the evidence of this book, Hillary appears to believe that good intentions excuse all. Impediments to her lofty goals may have arisen partly through minor miscalculations on her part, she concedes, but most of the problems, in her view, have come from pigheaded reactionaries 'who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made', thanks to the Democratic Party, a congregation of the elect whose mission is the salvation of mankind. "
"Zeena" [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I’ve always wooed women with words. I’m a writer, what else am I supposed to do? In the movie Dead Poets Society, a teacher gets his students interested in poetry by telling them that men study poetry in order to woo women.
I wooed women with letters, even when they lived in the same neighborhood. My letters were full of energy and hyperbole and hope. Sometimes I’d write a poem, which varied in quality from poor to very bad. Most of the time I had the good sense to leave out the poetry, or to include poems written by actual poets, especially E. E. Cummings. How many men have sent women the poem that begins, “somewhere i have never traveled…?” Woody Allen even used this lover’s gesture in a movie.
The letters were always sincere. In the beginning of a relationship, I always believed that all things were possible. I always believed that this one wouldn’t end like the last one. Fooling myself, I had little trouble fooling someone else.
I don’t regret writing any of them. From a certain point of view, they may look naïve and silly, self-delusive and deceitful, manipulative and aggressive. To me they are a sincere expression of how I felt at the time. I own up to every one of them.
However, once I learned my craft, love, lust or infatuation never turned me into a better writer – with one possible exception.
"Zeena" was a regular at Seafood Mama’s. I first noticed her as the companion of a man I’ll call “Harry.” Because it’s not my nature to compete for women, I entertained no fantasy of connecting with her in any romantic way, even though she was tall, thin and very attractive.
The first time we spoke I told her she reminded me of Dorothy Parker. I meant this as a compliment. Zeena, however, confused Dorothy Parker with Dorothy Killgallen and thought I was comparing her to the regular panelist on “What’s My Line,” which she took as an insult. We didn’t talk much after that.
Some time later, after she had stopped going with Harry, I was drunk enough to need a ride home from Seafood’s one night near closing time. Another regular, “Cal,” had a jeep and offered me a lift to the room I rented downtown. We were halfway there before I noticed that Zeena was in the jeep as well.
I assumed that she was heading off with Cal after they dropped me off. To my surprise, Zeena hopped out of the jeep behind me and followed me to the door of my building. She decided she was going to spend the night with me.
I have little recollection of what kind of night it was. I remember waking up with the How did I get so lucky? feeling. Zeena, on the other hand, wasn’t acting as if she’d had such a great time. In fact, I got the impression this was one of those one-night stands she could have lived without.
Normally this would have been enough to discourage me. I’m not sure why I didn’t bid her sayonara on the spot and send her on her way. Instead I invited her out to breakfast at Nobby’s. Before breakfast was over, I’d convinced her to spend the night with me again.
On our second night together, on which I made sure I was sober enough to remember what was happening, I watched Zeena undress. She felt self-conscious and said, “I feel like a character in a John Updike story.” This, of course, was the perfect thing to say to a writer. I was smitten.
We kept seeing one another and kept sleeping together – but I soon learned I wasn’t the only man Zeena shared a bed with. She had a boyfriend I’ll call “Mike” who was considerably younger than either of us (and Zeena was ten years younger than I). As I saw it, I (who didn’t compete for women) suddenly was in competition for Zeena with a young stud.
This went on for months, with Zeena sometimes spending the night with me, sometimes with Mike, but mostly spending the night alone. Mike and I knew about one another, and each of us wanted Zeena to ourselves, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, choose between us.
But it’s more complicated than this. The complication is that my relationship with Zeena was developing in a way that broke the usual pattern of my relationships with women in two important ways.
First, the initial connection between us was not in the realm of Eros. Good sex usually initiated my relationships with women, but Zeena and I weren’t clicking in bed with any consistency, which of course made me feel even more threatened by the young stud in her life. Yet it wasn’t Fidelia that was keeping us together either. We were still getting to know one another. What kept me interested in Zeena was – in some mysterious, irrational, magical way – something close to Agape. I felt like I’d known this woman all my life. I felt we had some deeply rooted connection that I couldn’t explain. It was as if we’d been lovers, or mates, or twins, in a previous life.
Probably it was all alcoholic wishful thinking, a delusion raised on insecurity because I found her so attractive but didn’t think she found me attractive. If she did, why was she always running back to Mike?
On a more mundane level, Zeena and I shared opinions on issues about which women usually disagreed with me. She shared my disdain for the culture of victimization and its exaltation of the art of whining. She believed dirty laundry was best kept in the closet out of sight. She didn’t like to be around people who were always feeling sorry for themselves. She looked at the glass as half-full, not half-empty. She had a big heart, befriending and knowing many homeless people by name.
Zeena had two grown sons of which she was very proud. She also had a boy who was being raised by the father’s parents, a situation about which she felt some ambivalence. Should she be raising the boy herself? I once entertained the fantasy that Zeena and I would go to Michigan, pick up her son from his grandparents, and all sail together into a sunset that led to Ireland, where we’d live happily ever after. Fortunately Zeena had better sense than to go along with such a crazy plan.
Even though our relationship was rocky, on one erotic occasion I felt as connected to Zeena as I’ve ever felt to anyone. In the middle of making love, we made eye contact – and there was something so open and fragile and wondrous in Zeena’s expression, as if her eyes were a portal leading me to the very core of her being, that I’ve never forgotten the moment. In memory, it remains a vivid, mysterious image. But I don’t know if this moment was shared and, at any rate, it never happened again.
The second way in which Zeena changed the pattern of my relationships with women was that she inspired me to write in a way I’d never written before. She inspired me to write sonnets.
6/19/2003 02:50:00 AM |
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Renewal Nothing like renewing the spirit after the dissatisfaction of "pop lit" (re post below about popular literature) by rereading an old favorite, in this case E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. I'm enjoying this gem of a novel even more this time around than my earlier readings. I think I'll next tackle my favorite Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel, which I haven't read in a long time.
6/18/2003 05:40:00 PM |
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No accounting for taste I read very little "popular fiction" but lately I've been trying, if without success. I almost never can finish a "popular" novel that I begin.
My latest attempt was with Gone For Good by Harlan Coban. I'd heard an interview with Coban on the radio and liked what he had to say about storytelling. He'd won prestigious awards and was frequently on the NY Times bestselling list. I thought I'd give him a try.
I made it through about fifty pages before I abandoned the book, which is farther than I usually get. Why did I put it down?
It wasn't the writing. Coban is a clean, crisp writer. I liked his style. A bit too glib and cute in spots but that goes with the genre (thriller), I suppose.
It wasn't for lack of suspense. I admired how Coban constructed his story so that I wanted to know what happened next ... well, a part of me did. But a part of me couldn't care less, and this part finally led me to abandon the book.
I quit because the characters had nothing to do with my life, not even remotely. They were stick figures for the plot, in the final analysis. And the story, for all its suspense, was so convoluted and extreme that I began to doubt it, I began to see that it was constructed as a game, a trick, for my attention, for my entertainment.
There is nothing wrong with entertainment -- in fact, I believe storytelling must be entertaining. But it also must be more than this. When I compare this novel with two I read and enjoyed this year -- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and July, July -- the difference is all in character. Not in the writing, not in the strategy of storytelling, but in character, in the people in the story and what problems and conflicts they face. These two novels I like have "ordinary" stories, ordinary situations, compared to Coban's convoluted world. These characters exist in a world that I recognize. These characters feel to me like they are real, that they have something to do with my life.
This is why what I habitually read and enjoy is what is usually called "a literary novel," though the term seems to have become pejorative among certain agents and publishers. When I began writing in the 1960s, the literary novel was a genre, an accepted and respected genre. In today's marketplace, where books with only modest sales (the best a literary novel usually could hope for) become B-list backseaters, everyone is after the big popular novel, the Coban novel. Seldom am I able to get through any of them (an exception is Elmore Leonard).
The actor William Macy, in talking about films, once said he demanded two things from a film: one, that it makes him want to know what happens next; and two, that it has something to do with his life. I would say the same thing about fiction. For me, popular novels often fail in the latter. There's no accounting for taste.
6/18/2003 07:21:00 AM |
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The Serial Monogamist [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Along with too much booze came too many women. They fit into one of two categories: one-night stands and those with whom I attempted a relationship, most of which lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, only a couple lasting as long as a year or more. The one-night stands were few and far between. Mostly I was a serial monogamist, moving from one steady girlfriend to another.
Most of these women I met in bars, which meant that more often than not they, too, had a drinking problem. Sometimes, in periodic frustrations with the bar scene, I met a woman by replying to a personal ad in the paper, and on one memorable occasion I even put in an ad myself. But mostly they were women who came to bars with some regularity, barflies like myself.
Very few of these women treated me as badly as I treated them. At best, the affair ended of its own inertia when not even sex, which was what brought us together in the first place and often was good and sometimes all we had in common, could keep us interested in one another. When the breakup was worse, it would be noisy and loud, full of drunken accusations, and when it was worst these histrionics would take place in a public bar.
The pattern was always the same. You bought a woman a drink, or she bought you a drink. You moved to a table for two or maybe just to adjacent barstools. You talked. You hit it off. One or the other suggested going to another bar, usually to one where you weren’t well known. You drank and talked some more. One or the other suggested going home together. Your place or mine? If there was booze in the apartment, you drank some more. You made love. You fell asleep, or passed out, together.
The next morning was always the key, the moment that defined whether this would be a one-night stand or an attempted relationship. Did I wake up with the feeling, My God, how did this happen? Or with the feeling, How did I get so lucky? If you felt the latter, if you made love again, if you had breakfast together, then the signs were good that a relationship would be attempted. You’d do this again. If you still were interested in one another a week later, you would do something besides go to a bar together. Maybe you’d go to a play or a movie or to dinner. Maybe you’d take a trip together out of town. Eros might find Fidelia standing by its side. Agape was usually nowhere to be found, but you can’t have everything in this world.
The women got bored with this routine before I did. Usually they wanted more than what we had together. Relationship gurus call this the “intimacy issue” but I don’t think it had much to do with intimacy at all. I think it had to do with the fact that, as a writer, I spent a lot of energy and focus within the world of my imagination, a world that was private. When a woman realized she was not a participant in this process, she felt left out, as indeed she was.
But this has little to do with intimacy. When someone speaking Chinese has a communication problem with someone speaking Arabic, it’s not a problem of intimacy, it’s a language barrier. Within the world of my imagination I was being intimate indeed, and in time, after the creative process was completed, the special arrangement of language we call a play or a story would become public, as intimate a communication as my art and craft permitted me to make. I might even hang out considerable dirty laundry in public, as I am doing here. Who gets more intimate than a writer?
This very discussion between a man and a woman occurs in my play Sad Laughter, which is based on the life of Moliere (excerpts appear in both The Best Stage Scenes of 1996 and The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 1996). Here is the great playwright in an exchange with his young wife:
ARMANDE: I can only try and make sense out of your actions, Jean. You never talk to me. I never know what you want. One day you say I should leave the stage, the next you offer me a great part. I don't think I really know you at all.
MOLIERE: Everybody knows me — I reveal myself to the world!
ARMANDE: Only on stage.
MOLIERE: All it takes is the price of a ticket to know me.
ARMANDE: I'm talking about my husband, not the playwright and actor. We play roles on stage, not ourselves.
MOLIERE: I don't always distinguish the difference.
Later Moliere tries to explain the relationship between his work and his life:
I often play the cuckold on stage, don't I? So maybe I'm just practicing. That's what we live for, isn't it? Perfecting our parts? Fine-tuning our roles? I know I haven't given you much attention lately. I mean, you're right, our life is a rehearsal. My life is a dress rehearsal for a play. Even now, as I hear myself talking, I wonder where I'll be putting this, in what future scene in what future play I'll be standing before someone like you, perhaps before you yourself, the actress, and I'll be the actor, and we'll be talking — in some play, some day — much as we are talking here now. Because that's what my life seems to be, a dress rehearsal for a play. Which, strictly speaking, doesn't really make my life much of a life at all, does it?
It’s all material – which is not necessarily a good thing. But it’s the way life is for a writer. Or at least for this one.
My writing, even more than my drinking, was the mistress against whom many women felt secondary and unable to compete. There were exceptions to this – Carol and Linda come immediately to mind, both of whom found ways to participate in my work (and in the next chapter you’ll meet “Zeena,” a participant as Muse) – but most women found that I did not have enough emotional energy left over from writing to give them what they needed. Who can blame them for leaving?
If the pattern of the relationship was similar, the women were not. In all ways they were different, and when I think of them now it’s as the individuals they were. Two, in particular, stand out in my memory, not because these short relationships were special but because the women were such remarkable and individual characters. They were, in fact, characters a writer might create.
The first I’ll call the Director. I met her on a sunny afternoon at a beer garden. I was ordering beer by the small pitcher, as I usually did, and drinking one after the other as I revised a play I was writing. This was during my residency period at the New Rose Theatre.
In time, a woman took the table next to me, also sitting alone, and she too began to work on something. We may have exchanged a smile but physically she was not the tall lithe type of woman I’m readily attracted to, so I entertained no thoughts of seduction and went back to work. It was she who made the first move.
Without asking, she joined me. She had noticed I was working on a script. She was a theater director and actress. I put aside my work, and we started chatting about theater. She was new in town and hoping to make connections, how serendipitous to run into me. She had a great personality, we hit it off, one thing led to another, and I ended up going home with her.
The next morning I dismissed the experience as a one-night stand. A few days later I received something in the mail from her. It was a report card. She had graded my lovemaking performance in a variety of categories. I was not too pleased with my final grade, a B-minus, until I realized that this was about the grade I would have given her, too. We just hadn’t clicked in bed, which was fine. At the bottom of my report card, like a teacher’s note, she suggested a relationship as friends and theater artists, keeping sex out of it – but did I have any friends I might fix her up with?
How the hell can you not like a woman like that? She was ballsy, eccentric, unique – and she ended up being a talented theater artist as well. A few years later we worked on a grant project together, and she directed a script I wrote.
Still later I met a guy in a bar who had recently experienced the strangest one-night stand of his life. The woman had sent him a report card on his lovemaking, giving him a final grade of B+. The Director was up to her old tricks. I reminded the guy that his grade could have been worse and bought him a drink.
The other woman I remember so well is someone who responded to my personal ad. By and large, running the ad proved to be a confusing, immobilizing experience because I received over 100 replies – and every one of the women who wrote sounded like someone worth meeting. How was I supposed to choose between them? I also found it depressing that so many neat-sounding ladies were as unable as I was to find a partner of the opposite sex. Of course, in my ad I failed to mention that I spent four or five hours a day, on the average, in a barroom.
I probably wouldn’t have responded to any of the women at all had not one response caught my interest by the extreme measures it would take to meet its writer. This woman was a doctor, and she only could be reached by phone at home between the hours of four and five in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I’m a morning man. The thought of having an actual conversation with a woman before nine in the morning was very titillating. I called the woman as soon as I could, and we made a date to have lunch later in the week.
We agreed to meet at a downtown restaurant near the waterfront. I went early and sat at the bar, lubricating my nerves while wanting to call the whole thing off. I tried to imagine dating a doctor and couldn’t.
She was late, which actually was a relief. I entertained the fantasy that she was standing me up. Then, just as I was about to give up on her, a red sports car swerved to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the door into the bar. A tall dark lanky woman, just my type, rushed through the door and grabbed a man who was sitting on the stool nearest to her. “Are you Charles?” she asked. The man was a born comic. He replied, “No, but I wish I was.”
I identified myself, and the Doctor, grabbing my arm, pulled me outside. The sports car’s engine was idling. She introduced herself and asked if a picnic lunch would work.
She had prepared a wonderful gourmet feast, which we ate in Washington Park overlooking the city. It was about as romantic a first date, a blind date at that, as you can have. We seemed to hit it off and before she had to rush back to the hospital, we made a second date.
I was very optimistic about this relationship for several weeks. She had an incredible apartment on an upper floor in a downtown highrise. She loved theater. She was even familiar with my work. Maybe going out with a doctor, with a woman rolling in dough, wouldn’t be so bad after all.
But then came the rest of the story. She said she liked me. She liked me so much that she wanted to give me a complete makeover. She wanted to buy me expensive clothes, getting me out of my usual jeans and work shirt. She wanted to set me up in her apartment. She wanted to buy me a car. She wanted me to escort her to all the fine fancy events of the city. I had to look the part, of course. She wanted me to be her boy-toy.
I think I actually considered the offer for a few minutes. In those days, I always gave free rent the time of day. But I already had free rent, and all I had to do for it was to collect the rent of others and keep honest books. What I liked least about the offer, of course, was the makeover. Today your jeans, tomorrow your soul.
The funny thing is, the Doctor wasn’t used to being turned down. She wasn’t used to being rejected. She couldn’t believe that I, a starving writer, wouldn’t let her take care of me. Who the hell did I think I was, pseudo-bohemian slob that I was, not to let her buy me a thousand dollar wardrobe? Didn’t I know that clothes make the man? How do you expect to become a famous playwright if you dress like that? And so forth and so on.
It wasn’t a friendly separation. A few years later, when I ran into her at a play, looking a tad ridiculous in her furs at this particular dungeon of a theater, she refused to acknowledge my presence. I was happy to notice that the boy-toy accompanying her looked miserable as hell.
6/18/2003 07:03:00 AM |
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_The Writing Life