"Life can only be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards."
--Kierkegaard

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

1964-74

1964-74: As an adult, I’ve never been fond of holidays -- not Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays, especially not July 4 (ever since I spent it in a VA hospital and saw Vietnam war vets diving for cover at the sound of fireworks, yelling “Incoming!”) -- with the exception of about ten years from the mid-60s to mid-70s when Thanksgiving became the most glorious day of the year. This was when I was part of a five couple gathering -- 10 adults, 6 children -- who celebrated friendship and family with music, great and abundant food and drink, frequent laughter, and a whole lot of spontaneous fun.

This tradition began when J and I joined the Bs and Fs for Thanksgiving in LA. It was such a success that we decided to do it again the next year, and I invited two more couples, old army buddies, the Cs and Rs. Thereafter we ten became the nucleus of the celebration, with occasional additions or absences, but mostly all of us making a point of being there each Thanksgiving.

We rotated the home where we’d gather. The tradition was so strong it even continued after some of us left LA. Indeed, one of the most memorable gatherings was at D’s house in San Jose, with the Bs and Fs coming up from LA, the Rs from Nevada, and P and I coming down from Eugene.

Within the large tradition, smaller ones emerged. P would always bring a crate of oranges so we could have fresh orange juice for breakfast. He also became morning bartender for his celebrated gin fizzes. D often brought a mixed case of wine. There was always a huge turkey, of course, but also roasts or duck or even BBQ. All the trimmings, everything made from scratch -- group cooking was a major activity at these gatherings -- were included. My specialties was oyster dressing as a side dish and shrimp aspic.

The children were incredible, which is to say, well behaved. Another tradition was my chasing them around the house and yard as Wolf Man, something the younger ones begged for long before I was ready to play. I’d turn into Wolf Man several times a day, to their shrieks and delight.

Evenings were devoted to folk music, over half of us playing instruments and singing. Several of the kids also sang, including L from an early age, who later as a young woman would move in with me in Portland, a small scandal until reality settled in.

Laughter was frequent at these gatherings, all of us seeing the Human Comedy everywhere and eager to share it. I don’t remember a single moment of anger, hostility, or bad vibes. These were love fests, a celebration of friendship. And a celebration of diversity, because we were white, black and yellow at a time when civil rights were an evolving, often hostile, issue in the country. We made our own little utopia of caring human relationships.

I stopped going after we moved east. Then my marriage split up. Thanksgiving was never the same. But the decade of those remarkable gatherings will never be forgotten. I feel blessed to have experienced them.

Monday, August 25, 2014

2006-10

2006-10: I started making digital films rather by accident. The possibility had never occurred to me, and certainly I had no burning desire to become a filmmaker. Then something happened to change all this.

My wife needed a new video camera. She had damaged hers on a river trip, getting it wet. I saw an ad for what sounded like an amazing new product, a mini-camcorder called The Flip, no larger than a cell phone, something she could slip into her purse. I got her one for a present.

She started using it and one day cornered me to watch some of her clips. She was able to show them over our TV. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: the quality from this tiny video camera was outstanding, looking like broadcast TV to my unprofessional eyes. I immediately thought, with this small camera, you could make a movie -- if you could edit what you shot.

This was the beginning. New technology. I had no experience in video editing, although as a young man I had edited the family 8mm home movies. I browsed the Internet for video editing programs and discovered they were far less expensive than I had assumed. I could get something pretty good for a few hundred dollars. I could become a filmmaker. What a concept.

I well knew, being an experienced playwright and screenwriter, that good actors were essential to any worthy project. I contacted a few actor friends and advertised for others on Craig’s List, making clear that I was shooting a non-commercial movie and payment would be a DVD of the finished product, nothing more. The product also would be posted online.

I was flooded with applications -- actors are a hungry bunch, eager for any kind of work they can get. I did some auditions after writing a short script, cast the film, and started shooting. It was so much fun I made another. And another. The actors had fun, too, so I kept using the same ones mostly, now and again adding someone, others dropping out of a project if they had a conflict. In this way, I fashioned something of my own film company. My first efforts were put together on a DVD called Digital Summer 2007 to pass along to friends.

This was not commercial filmmaking, to be sure. It was closer to underground, guerrilla filmmaking. With so small a camera, I could shoot anywhere at any time. I never got permission or jumped through the legal hoops of commercial filmmaking. This was glorified home moviemaking, using dramatic scripts and good actors.

Once, shooting at night in a bar, the manager got suspicious and came to our table to ask what we were doing. An actor immediately said it was his birthday, we were celebrating -- quick thinking that got the table a round of free drinks!

I learned that I loved editing. It was the most fun, and the most challenging, part of the project. Labor intensive, time consuming -- but so much artistic control! Well, as long as you had the shots you needed, which often was not the case. A lot of on the spot creative problem solving always happened.

Making digital films changed my attitude about screenwriting. A big issue with Hollywood screenwriters is the “a film by” credit that a director gets at the start of a movie. Screenwriters don’t like the director getting all the glory when they wrote the script. I was always on the screenwriters’ side of this issue until I started making my own digital films. I realized how, in fact, it IS a film “by the director” because the script is a blueprint only, a start up guide, and what the audience sees depends on many small instant decisions through the long process. Indeed, the editor is as important as the screenwriter. The director is the boss of everyone. And on my projects, of course, I wore all these hats.

Finally, at the challenge of some students, I decided to shoot a feature film with The Flip. And no budget. None of my projects had any budget at all! All the stories were contemporary, all the locations real spaces during real time, business hours or otherwise, using whoever was around as backdrop extras. Underground, guerrilla filmmaking, like I said.

I didn’t have time to write a feature script so I wrote a story outline and worked with actors I knew could improvise. I think they did a better job than any script I would have written. The feature is called The Farewell Wake.

There are three versions of this online. Once again, payment was a DVD, so I felt obliged to have a version using everyone who appeared. But this version obviously was too long. I made the DVD for the actors and went back to editing. I came up with a director’s cut, some ten minutes shorter. Then a year later I came up with a second director’s cut, another ten minutes shorter. This is the version I own up to.

I really enjoyed myself making these digital films, all of which are in my online archive for free viewing (see www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/ssv.htm). But digital filmmaking requires more energy than I have any more. My days doing this are done. That’s fine.

The circumstances of my best short film, Deconstructing Sally, deserve mention. It was another of those Big Accidents that stir the pot.

A reunion was planned of English major graduate students who were at the U of Oregon in the sixties. This meant my ex might be there -- and that might cause friction because she had disowned me. I wanted to go but I certainly didn’t want to have a confrontation with her. What I needed was a symbolic fence between us: the Flip! I would go down to the reunion with my camera and shoot like crazy, allowing no time for personal confrontation, and I would have the later possibility of editing a story about the reunion.

I did this, and she never showed, and I ended up with a short that got reviewed and praised. Deconstructing Sally is personal and focused, my best short digital film.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

1980s

1980s: I was represented by half a dozen agents over my long career but I lost the best two through no fault of my own. 

 One worked for Fifi Oscard in NYC and repped my plays. She was a fan and a supporter. She got me a commission from the prestigious Actors Theatre of Louisville, which I blew because I was obsessed with hyperdrama at the time and didn’t give it the energy it needed. Another lost opportunity.

During a business trip to Seattle, the agent decided to come down to Portland and meet me. We’d only talked on the phone and exchanged letters. I was living in the NW area of Portland at the time, in those wonderful years before gentrification. The agent was mightily impressed with the neighborhood: this is just the way Greenwich Village used to be, she told me. Hope it never changes.

The neighborhood changed quickly after that. So did the agent. She saw the handwriting on the wall as multinational corporations started buying up theaters, publishers and film studios, a major transformation of the arts that still isn’t fully understood. She wanted no part of the change. She quit the business. I did not come into the business to hype bad plays, she told me, but to champion good plays. That aspect of my business is swiftly fading. I’m out of here.

The other favorite agent repped my screenplays. She worked for a small boutique agency in LA but was so good she was wooed away by a big corporate agency. She could not take her clients with her unless they had brought in a million dollars in the past five years (!!!), which definitely did not include me. She wrote me a letter explaining how she had argued hard to keep me as a client but they didn’t accept her position. She loved my work, wanted me as a client, and said if I wanted to return after my first big sale, which shouldn’t be long now, she’d love to have me back. That big first sale never happened.

Two other agents are worth mentioning. One considered my screenplay Sad Laughter the best script to come across his desk, and told a colleague so at a writer’s conference only a few years ago, decades after the fact. The other talked me into letting him rep my mystery novel Dead Body In A Small Room (a finalist for Mystery of the Year at Foreword Magazine) as the first in a screenwriter-as-detective series. Man, it would have been disastrous if he’d have sold this! That kind of repetitive writing gets old quick with me.

I don’t cry in my iced coffee over all the close calls in my career. My case is not rare. Writers with close calls are all over the literary landscape. In contrast, I cherish the validation of the agents who have responded to my work, and I well know what a crap shoot the whole literary business is. I especially know because I’ve been on the other end, a judge in contests, an editor at a magazine and journal. I’ve rejected a lot of excellent work because it wasn’t what I was after at the time.

My favorite story in this regard is when I was one of three judges determining ten winners of scriptwriting fellowships in Illinois. We had 70 finalists, both stage plays and screenplays, from which to select ten. Besides myself, there was the artistic director of a gay theater in LA and a black female theater professor from Texas. A politically correct panel if ever there was one!

We met on a conference call after reading the scripts and making our individual top ten selections. Guess what? There were no duplications. I repeat, THERE WERE NO DUPLICATIONS. That is, no single writer was on two top ten lists. Three qualified judges couldn’t agree on a single top ten writer! This, ladies and gentlemen, is all you need to know about literary awards, prizes, grants and fellowships.

We decided everyone got their top three -- then argued long and hard for the tenth award. I won -- because all nine winners were playwrights, and my fourth was a screenwriter. In fact, these two fellow judges did not really know how to read a screenplay, that different aesthetics were involved. They criticized a screenplay for being underwritten!

The literary life is a crapshoot with regard to traditionally defined success. That’s all that can be said about it.

Friday, August 22, 2014

1950-5

1950-5: My family camped before camping became fashionable. Most of the neighbors considered it weird behavior. We didn’t tent camp or trailer camp. We slept under the stars.

We did this often on weekends in the Mojave Desert, and we did it on long trips across the country to visit relatives in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The weekend trips began by mounting the 75 inch long telescope on the roof of the Packard. My dad had built it for me, and I used it constantly, especially looking forward to using it under the clear desert sky. This was my exclusive activity on weekend camping trips: sleeping as much as possible in the hot day, staying up all night with my telescope.

Each family member had weekend favorite activities. My mom would find shade, or make it, and do crossword puzzles. My dad would take his shotgun and go rabbit hunting. I don’t remember him ever shooting one, though I do remember an occasional shot. My brother would dress up in his Davy Crocket costume, made by our talented seamstress mother, and go off looking for Indians. Hopefully dad wouldn’t mistake him for a rabbit. He never did.

Across country was different. No telescope, no shotgun. But crosswords and Davy Crocket traveled well. Along the way, we played a game called Chinkie. In this game, you searched for horses and when you found them, yelled Chinkie!, the first to find them getting a point per horse, two for a white horse. If you found a cemetery, you yelled, Graveyard, throw away your chinkies!, which everybody else had to do.

I think Dad cheated. After weeks of playing this across the country, he seemed always to find a hidden cemetery as we drove into New Jersey near the end of our trip. I think we went there on purpose.

At any rate, both weekend and cross country trips brought a number of stories worth remembering. Here are some of them.

The Telescope. It looked like a canon on top of the Buick and always got stares from passers-by and comments at a gas station. It was taller than I was … it was six foot, three inches, and six inches in diameter. A damn good telescope for an amateur like myself. Dad also made an equatorial mounting for it, which weighed a ton. It traveled in the trunk. I’m sure all of their weight and wind resistance added cost to the trip. Dad didn’t seem to care.

Mom and the moon. It never failed. The family would tuck in with a moon up, as I prepared for a night of star-gazing. Some hours later, mom would wake up and be startled, sometimes sounding almost frightened. Where is the moon? she would ask if it had set, or The moon was over here when I went to bed! if it had just moved with the earth’s rotation. The machinery of the universe didn’t seem to register with mom. She wanted her moon just where she left it.

Apple pie. The culture used to be nicer, no doubt because it was less dangerous. On cross country trips, at the end of the day we’d just pull off the road. Ideally, we’d take a dirt road into a field, stop and sleep alongside of it. We were trespassing, of course, and today we’d be met with anger and shotguns, I suppose, but in the 1950s this never happened to us. 90% of the time we were ignored but now and again a farmer’s truck would pass by and he’d wave. Or, on several occasions, a truck would pull up and a farmer would get out with a pie for us, saying, My wife’s apple pie won the blue ribbon at the fair last year, I bet you folks would appreciate one. People used to be so kind!

As I got older in high school, I was more interested in hanging out with fellow brains than going camping with the folks, and I dropped out of the habitual excursions. But I loved them when they happened, as they often did. We did a lot together as a family in those days.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

1963

1963: My year working at Burroughs Corp. after the Army was an education. A major lesson was this: I wanted no part of corporate life. There were too many rules, especially regarding things that I thought were silly.

An example. I punched a time clock. At the same time, I’m a morning person, and I found I got a lot more work done if I came in early before the other employees, with all their chat and activity and distractions. So I did. Because the parking lot was pretty empty, I parked near the entrance.

I drove an old Ford that my wife had picked up while I was overseas. It almost always could use a washing. This, and coming in early, caught the attention of the corporate powers that be.

I was asked to park my car away from the entrance so it couldn’t be seen by people entering the building. Bad image. Okay, what the hell.

Coming in early, I didn’t punch in -- but then I often forgot to punch in at 9, so I had to go to my boss to fix this so I’d get paid for a complete day. This, too, became a hassle.

But the most lasting impression at Burroughs were the miserable lives of some co-workers. There was a bar down the street and a happy hour set up by punching in and paying what your receipt said. I started having a drink after work with three guys, all of them bright college graduates with degrees in English and History, two of them wannabe writers -- and all of them hating their jobs, feeling trapped in their lives. I kept getting the advice, don’t have kids too soon, they will trap you.

The fine novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates presents this world with great accuracy. These guys were witty, bright, talented -- but felt stuck in their corporate jobs, a tech writer, a financial guy, because their life responsibilities now depended on the good incomes they brought home. Man, I never hung around such misery or people hating their work, not even in the Army.

When I decided to quit and go back to school, they celebrated. More advice, go teach, go write, do anything but stay out of corporate America, despite the good money.

Indeed, just before I left, I had an invitation to stay. Seems like a major crisis happened when my boss and number two man were both out sick. It was assumed I couldn’t be of help but I did learn what the problem was. On my own, in the next hour and a half, I solved the problem with a few phone calls and made a chart presenting the solution. Since I had nothing to lose, I hand-delivered the chart to the secretary of the Big Number One Corporate Honcho, who wanted the answer, which is why everyone was in a tizzy. Then I forgot about it.

A few days later my boss called me in. What happened while I was gone etc, because Number One wanted to see me personally. So I got escorted into this gigantic plush corporate office, where Number One sat behind a humongous desk.

I had impressed the hell out of him with my chart. He wanted to know what my future plans were, because young talent like myself were needed in the corporation. In fact, he wanted me to work for him.

He thought it was a good idea for me to get a college degree, as long as I came back to Burroughs Corp. when I graduated. He would like to have me on his team, he said again. He mentioned some incredible salary.

Now no doubt this was an incredible opportunity if I had been naïve enough to respond to it. I played dumb, thanked him, and left more eager than ever to get back in school.

 I’ve always had a talent for turning down financial opportunities.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

1958 / 2014

1958 / 2014: My high school friend M, who committed suicide after our freshman year at Cal Tech, was probably the brightest of our group. I didn’t know him as well as others because he didn’t play sandlot sports, and several of us did. I went on to letter in football, basketball and track at Cal Tech. But M played chess, and we were very evenly matched. He never forgave me for beating him in the Pasadena High School championship match. I have the trophy right here in my office.

M was far better read than any of us. Although majoring in chemistry as a Cal Tech freshman, he read very widely, and I can remember him reading and talking about the speeches of Churchhill, H. G. Well’s History of the World, and most especially a series of books up Upton Sinclair, about whom M became passionate, in his low key way.

M liking Sinclair was striking because his parents were conservative Republicans. This, I think, would become part of his psychological profile and dilemma. When his mother called me to talk to him (he lived around the corner) during the summer of his suicide, I found a M I didn’t know, with crazed eyes and a collection of homosexual porn. This is why it makes sense to me that he was a closet gay in those difficult, hidden years. His death, in fact, was not given out as suicide; I learned the truth later from his brother. It made more sense than anything else.

M comes to mind as I write this because I came across a novel of Sinclair’s called Boston, a documentary novel of Sacco-Vanzetti. At a dime I couldn’t turn it down, a fat hard cover that weighs a ton. I’ve only read the intro by Howard Zinn, who praises it greatly, but I look forward to beginning it and hopefully getting hooked and finishing it. I read an autobiography of Sinclair some time back, which was astounding. A forgotten genius of American letters.

And I always will associate Upton Sinclair with M, an author he could embrace in rebellion against his strong-willed and demanding mother. I was never comfortable in their home, which meant we played most of our chess games at mine. At Cal Tech we drifted apart, he in Chemistry, I in math and suddenly a college jock. The summer I talked to him some weeks before his suicide, we had not talked in several months.

Suicide can be brave or cowardly, sad but necessary or tragic. His definitely was tragic. He was a victim of his times.

 I’ll be thinking of him as I read Boston.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

1954

1954: His name was C but everybody called him Red. He’d had polio, the story went, which had left him with a disfigured arm and a severe limp when he walked. These didn’t affect his outgoing personality or his determination to be “the class clown” in our Jr. High class. It was Red who got me into collecting the autographs of NFL players.

Many teams coming in to play the LA Rams stayed at Pasadena’s Green Hotel. Red would find players in the lobby in the early afternoon before they headed out for a light practice. After pestering me to go with him for weeks, I finally went -- and for a short time became interested in the hobby myself.

Red seemed to be known by all the players, he had been at this so long. Hey Red! an NFL star would shout across the hotel lobby as we entered. I was very impressed.

My favorite player at the time was the 49ers recent halfback, Hugh McElhenny. This was largely my dad’s doing. McElhenny had been an All-America player at the University of Washington. After his first year of playing pro ball, he was asked to compare the different between pro and college. His answer was one of my dad’s favorite stories. Oh I like pro ball okay, McElhenny said, but I don’t like the salary cut.

Dad loved to root for underdogs, and nothing pleased him more than to go to the LA Coliseum and root for the visiting rival SF 49ers. I picked up his enthusiasm.

One Saturday with the 49ers in town, we find McElhenny in the hotel lobby and finally get to ask for his autograph. And then a miracle happens. As he signs my book, he says to Red and me, Can you kids help me out? I need to get a present for my nephew’s birthday.

And with this we go shopping with my sports hero to pick out a gift! We end up spending almost two hours with Hurricane Hugh, being treated to ice cream to tap off the perfect boyhood fantasy.

The next day I go to the game with my dad, and we root with great enthusiasm for the visiting 49ers. I don’t remember the score. The home team usually won these cross-town rivalries.

 I never got very serious about collecting autographs. I finally gave my book away to another collector. But I’ll never forget my few hours with a sports legend and football hero.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

1969

1969: Almost every weekend, we hosted a party at our little house near the university. For some grad students, we became a home away from home, providing food, drink, entertainment. Now and again, it all became too much and we had to get away to be by ourselves.

On one such occasion we were camping on the Oregon coast. Sitting around a campfire at night, talking, singing, sipping beer, we suddenly were greeted by a huge hulk of a man coming out of the darkness. He was scruffy, bearded, carrying a guitar. He asked if he could join us.

His name was J and he sang country. I loved his work, especially his covers of Merle Haggard songs. When the beer ran out, he excused himself and came back from his adjacent campsite with a bottle of Ouzo. Ends up he had been living in his camper for almost a year. He had inherited some money after the death of his father, had quit his job, bought the camper and was seeing the country with nothing but a few changes of clothes, his guitar, and a case of Ouzo. Presently he was on his way from Alaska to Disneyland, before heading home to Detroit before his money ran out.

We invited him over for breakfast the next morning. As we parted, we gave him our address in Eugene, look us up if you’re ever back in Oregon. We expected never to see him again.

A few months later I was doing something or other in the kitchen. P was gone, studying in the university library. Bluegrass music was on the phonograph. I heard a pounding on the screen door and yelled, Come on in!

It was J. A young woman was with him, and they were dressed in matching cowboy outfits, looking like strange versions of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. They were on their honeymoon, he explained, looking for a place to settle down. He really liked the Pacific Northwest.

They ended up getting an apartment in Eugene. His wife, Pe, easily found a job as a nurse, and J started looking. We brought them into our music and social circle, where J’s country songs were a big hit.

A few weeks later, I opened the door to see a J I barely recognized. His hair was short, his beard was gone, and he wore a three-piece suit. He’d found a job as an accountant.

Later they bought a place out in the country. They raised chickens and pigs, Pe being right at home, having grown up on a dairy farm.

Maybe the funniest thing I ever saw was J trying to kill chickens. He was in the pen, wildly swinging a hatchet amidst flying chaos, feathers everywhere. When Pe came out to see how he was doing, she collapsed in hysterics. She recovered, entered the pen, and in no time had grabbed two chickens by the neck and with a quick maneuver of her wrist, had broken their necks. Our chicken dinner was on its way.

One day I returned from school to find a cardboard box on the porch. In it was the head of a pig! J had heard me say I wanted to make my own headcheese. Here was my start. I did make it, a long and labor-intensive process, but my headcheese was not as good as what I could buy, so I never tried again. But it was nice to find the head of a pig on the porch and give it the old college try.

Another day I agreed to pick up J after an eye exam. He wouldn’t be able to drive. He came out white as a sheet. He was wearing a bracelet. He had been diagnosed as diabetic. No more booze, he said, then made me promise to take him on one last bender before he told his nurse wife. I did. How could I turn down a good friend?

In the end, J learned how to drink despite the disease, peeing on litmus paper, shooting up with insulin, learning an entire routine.

They ended up moving to Port Townsend after Pe got a job in Seattle. P and I had broken up by then, but I loved visiting them on the island. J died suddenly up there. I’ve since lost track of Pe, which I regret. Maybe she moved back to family in Michigan’s UP.

 J was a very special friend, never forgotten.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

1971

1971: The year I received my MFA in Playwriting from the University of Oregon, P and I had more income than we knew what to do with. Very unusual for grad students! She had managed to get back her complete scholarship, and I had three sources of income, any one of which we could have lived on. I was a Teaching Assistant (which I would continue to be until she finished her PhD in a few years), I had Cold War GI Bill benefits, and I had received a fat Shubert Playwriting Fellowship. We kept a lot of the English department in spaghetti and beer and still managed to save thousands of dollars.

We decided to live on some of it that summer, camping hither and yon across the country at whim. We had only one obligation: I had to appear in Virden, Canada, to be best man at my office mate’s wedding. 

Otherwise, we went where we felt like and ended up roaming between Oregon and Nova Scotia, in an unforgettable trip I later wrote up for Northwest Magazine, which was published as “Travels With Ruby.” Ruby was the 1965 VW Bug that my dad had given me as a UCLA graduation present.

Here are a few highlights from the trip.

Ichthyosaur National Monument. We are camping in the Nevada desert. I’m looking at the map over morning camp stove coffee. A long dirt road leads to something called the Ichthyosaur National Monument. What the hell’s an ichthyosaur? A prehistoric fish, says P. Bright lady. Hey, let’s go there!

We unpack in a small camp ground, the only ones there. There’s a large building, which turns out to be a whore house, and a small building, which turns out to be a forest ranger. We drink beer with the madam at the house and the ranger and get the story of this strange place.

It’s a corporate party pad. This explains the air field behind the building. Small corporate jets bring in their executives and reward them with prostitutes for a weekend. In fact, says S, the madam or bartender or whatever she calls herself, there’s a big party this weekend.

Otherwise the only others who hang around here are collectors. They dig in the hills for bottles, old coins. In fact, we saw a few on the drive in.

S had so many stories, we decide to stay an extra day, leaving before the jets arrive. We don’t feel up to all that. But S impresses me so much that years later, I name the bartender in a play after her.

The Northern Lights. This was the highlight of the wedding in Canada. Neither of us have seen such spectacular displays. One night I lay on my back on the street, gazing up at the show. It almost makes you religious.

I also enjoy drinking with the father of the bride at the Canadian Legion.

Shreveport. We visit my Army buddy B. He lives in an upper middle class housing development on the outskirts of town. All black tenants. His friends and neighbors are shocked that we are white. He never mentioned this in his many stories about our exploits in the Army.

P is a little taken aback by B’s recklessness, as I am. He has a beer in his crotch whenever he drives. We stay a few days, survive all the partying, and from B’s wife I get some excellent gumbo cooking tips in my volunteer role of assistant cook.

New Jersey. My blue collar relatives welcome us warmly but their kids are a little more honest. I have a big bushy beard. P wears no makeup. At one point a little girl, a distant cousin, comes up and asks inquisitively, Are you hippies?

Potted Head. The best sandwich in Nova Scotia. We call it head cheese in the states. A lunch on a cliff with the ocean spray keeping us cool becomes the emblematic moment of my joy with P, what I take to be mutual joy, but after the strange and bitter breakup, she’ll have nothing to do with any fond memories between us. It’s as if her heterosexual self, or even her bi self, never existed.

However, many years later, she will tell my brother that the only good thing in her marriage to me was this: the sex was spectacular. That actually throws me for a loop, as I explain in my short film, Deconstructing Sally. But given this, why the hell doesn’t she use the memory to cherish some of the past? Why throw out the baby with the bath water? Can't she even admit she helped me become a writer?

Booze To Go. A sweltering afternoon. We are driving through a small town in the Midwest. I see a sign at a bar: Drinks to go window. No way. I drive into the alley and up to the window. What will you have? We leave with a tray of gin and tonics. Utopia! as far as we’re concerned this hot day.

European football. Another hot day. This one in the southwest. Another small town, Main Street. We find a tavern for a beer -- and it is packed, almost standing room only, with young men and women. College students, it turns out, mostly foreign students, rooting for some big soccer game on the tube. This may be my first introduction to the passion many have for European “futbol”. I never saw anything like it.

We have a few beers, enjoy the people watching, and get back on the road.

A concert. Before leaving relatives in New Jersey, a cousin who has heard our music and become a fan, talks us into giving a concert in the public park. Ends up the whole town shows up. Not much entertainment around there. P performs and I perform -- we did very few songs together! -- and someone tapes it. Later copies get made. All the relatives get one.

We don’t do many songs together because I don’t like to screw up P’s lovely voice. We already had our own body of songs when we met, and we only added two or three things to do together, mostly group singing things where her lead doesn’t matter.

Northwest Magazine. “Travels With Ruby” becomes a cover story. But the painting of Ruby on the cover is wrong, they have a 1966 not a 1965, there was a subtle change in the engine door.

I’m an “inner circle” writer at the magazine as long as JB is editor. After I’m a regular, he rejects nothing. At most he will request a rewrite. He publishes things that shouldn’t be published, in retrospect, but he wants to keep me happy for the big projects that come around. Once I am guest editor for an entire issue devoted to Easy Rider. Another time to an issue devoted to Society and Old Age. It’s a great relationship for me -- and a frustrating one for the young writers trying to break in, as I once was, as I remember being frustrated before I sold my first article to JB.

 The camping trip of 1971 lasted over two months. A once in a lifetime experience.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

1963

1963: I met P, T and C, who would become my closest friends in LA, at The Ash Grove during a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert. J and I had settled for a table in the rear upon entering, knowing tables would open up between sets. So they did, and we made a beeline for a table near the stage.

Coming from another direction, wanting to get the same table, were P, T and C. We got there at the same time. Before arguing about who got there first, we counted heads and chairs and concluded we all could sit down.

Ends up we had something in common: we all played guitars and sang folks music. At night’s end we traded phone numbers with a promise to get together and make music.

They told me later they never expected to hear from me again. After all, they were black, we were white, and in Los Angeles at the time this could be enough to stifle a friendship. But I phoned and we made a date to meet at P’s house for making music.

So began a long and close friendship. By the time I headed to Oregon for grad school a few years later, we were spending practically every weekend with them.

We got invited to their spectacular annual pig roast, which became the inspiration for an early award-winning short story, Presenting the Annual Interracial Pig Roast. I made a great mistake on this story and learned a lesson from it.

It was a work of fiction. Yet the pig roast itself was based on their own event, and two of the characters were very roughly based on P and T. So in the story I used their real names.

When the story got published in Prism International, I presented them with copies, thinking they would be honored. How naïve of me! They were perplexed. They were confused and a little angry. They were not literary people and the meaning of the story escaped them. All they saw were depictions of themselves that they considered caricatures, not understanding that the words came from the viewpoint character, who didn’t realize his own racism.

This story almost ended our friendship. But it didn’t, and I never again shared my work with them, the only sure way to avoid misunderstanding in the future.

We shared many great experiences over the years. One night P and I started arguing about who was the best blues artist, Lightnin’ Hopkins (P’s choice) or Brownie McGhee (mine), ignoring the fact that this was comparing apples and oranges. We argued all night, playing one example after another. Everyone went to bed, leaving us there. In the morning, we were still in front of the record player, as if zapped into sleep in mid-argument.

When we moved to Eugene for grad school, much of our stuff was hauled in T’s pickup, called The Blue Goose, which P drove, and I rode shotgun. We took two days, laying over with friends in SF.

One afternoon we passed a sign to one of the big jug wine wineries. They had a tasting room. Why not?

This was very different from tasting rooms at artisan wineries. It was as huge as a ballroom, and when you selected your wine, you were given a bottle, not a glass. All this free wine had attracted area winos, who came out of the back woods to pick up bottles at the back door, taking them back into the woods. It was an amazing sight to see. Something of a wino paradise.

We started spending every Thanksgiving with them and expanded the guest list to include two couple friends of mine, D (my soul brother) and wife, and L (an Army buddy) and his wife, V. V became very close to C, T’s wife. Indeed, a few years ago, at my last trip to LA, V came up to me and said, Thank you for my life.
What she meant was, introducing her to C had started a friendship that came to define her life -- and I had introduced them.

P died suddenly in his sleep at much too long an age. I was living with L, his daughter, at the time. T and C are still alive and kicking in LA. L sees them often and will play guitar when T sings in church.

Monday, August 11, 2014

1988

1988: I had a very rewarding experience at the prestigious Catlin Gabel school, in 1988 as a writer-in-residence, the next year as a scholar-in-residence (they wanted me back but had to use a different source of money). That first year was especially incredible. I worked with ten high school seniors interested in theater.

We met in a cabin off the soccer field. A school house in the woods! These kids were bright and motivated, though not always in sync with what I had planned for them to do. I offered a variety of options for our year’s project, and they chose the most difficult one: to write and produce a hyperdrama! I loved their energy in doing this.

What they came up with was truly extraordinary, a tour de force and satire about the school. The story is about a rebellion of students when the Headmaster decides to make French the official language of the school (they all hated French, which apparently was required). Besides the split narrative, difficult enough, they wrote and produced a FILM that was shown during the play, which was a satire of the official video sent to prospective parents. I swear, these kids were amazing!

There was one, but only one, issue causing friction. A very bohemian girl in class didn’t want to have to read her lines, she wanted to improvise her part in the play. Ends up she was a poet, so the other students concocted a story in which she appears as a ghost, wandering around reciting her poetry -- which is exactly what she did during performance. It worked.

This girl was a trip. She didn’t get along with a very stylish girl in class, who wanted to be a clothing designer. The bohemian dressed, well, very differently from “stylish.” Moreover, the bohemian girl didn’t shave her armpits and loved to sit across from the stylish girl and put her hands behind her head, exposing the armpits, which grossed out the stylish girl.

One morning, taking the bus to Catlin Gabel, I saw the bohemian girl in the back of the bus. A Russian ship was docked on the river, and she had spent the night on it, partying with Russian sailors! She had souvenirs from the occasion, trinkets, coins, a Russian flag.

Her poetry was hard for me to understand but within the context of the play it seemed to be perfect, just the odd ambiance of surreal imagery that the performance needed.

The production was incredible but most folks didn’t “get it,” just as they don’t know how to respond to hyperdrama for the most part, but I was damn proud and amazed by these kids, and I don’t think I had all that much to do with their achievement.

I kept hoping one of them would turn into a playwright and write a hyperdrama but if this happened, I never heard about it.

 Just a singular, odd, moment of first rate work by a group of talented teenagers.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

1991

1991: Great hot weather, like we’ve been having recently, brings to mind what may be my favorite summer in Portland. I say this because I was living in a small subsidized studio apartment downtown, and my money was good. Most of what I needed was for booze. What made the summer special was that I had bought a rubber inflatable raft at a garage sale, and this is the summer I used it practically every day.

I kept it inflated in my studio, which meant it took up most of the floor space. Every day, weather permitting, I carried the raft on my head to the marina near the Hawthorne Bridge, where I put it into the Willamette River. I got to doing this at the noon hour in a perverted sense of showing the corporate work force what bohemian freedom looked like.

Once in the river, I almost always rowed to Ross Island, a good ways, damn good exercise. I usually had beer with me, sometimes I made a lunch. There was a small beach at the north end of the island, where I put up and spent the afternoon reading, napping, brooding over whatever project I was working on.

Man, I felt like a king on that island! I can count on one hand the times I saw another human being there. I was dating E at the time and rowed her out a few times, providing champagne and a gourmet lunch. Bohemians can impress the ladies just like the corporate studs do.

One time, waiting at a stop light, on a hot day pushing 100, a guy in a sports convertible pulled to the curb and wanted to buy my raft. He got up to $200 but it wasn’t for sale.

I must have been quite a spectacle, my raft on my head, walking in downtown Portland through the crowded lunch streets. I loved it.

I had one mishap. A strong southward wind came up, which made it very hard to row back to the marina from the island. I was getting nowhere. After about an hour, exhausted, I was rescued by a pleasure boater, who towed me in.

I learned you actually didn’t need a lot of money to feel like a millionaire. I sure felt like one out on the river. Even during the blues festival, when my small raft was a nuisance to all the boats on the river to hear the music, I felt, well, superior in my beat up used raft to all those fancy boaters.

 Wealth is a matter of attitude. Actually I still have it, though these days, in my period of old age and reclusion, I do nothing to flaunt it. No one would notice anyway, they’d be too busy texting.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

1950

1950: One of the highlights of my good childhood were the several years my granddad lived with us. This was my dad’s father. My mother’s father, whom I only met a few times, was a religious tyrant. He almost destroyed the life of my mother’s sister, a favorite aunt, B, by condemning her on his death bed.

B was a singer in a big band. They opened for some famous bands on the Jersey pier in the days before the war. But her father didn’t approve, and when he condemned her with his dying breath, she flipped out.

A Presbyterian, she converted to Catholicism and tried to be a nun. Failing, she ended up in Pasadena, close to her sister (mom), a secretary in the math department at the city college. She lived modestly and gave most of her income to the church.

She also lived secretly. We were close, so she made me the executor of her estate (mom died first). Her small apartment in Pasadena, so quaint and clean, with little doilies everywhere, held a great secret: every hidden spot, in closets, under furniture, behind items, held an empty liquor bottle. Aunt B literally was a closet alcoholic. She may have died because she ran out of hiding places for the empty bottles of booze she must have been too embarrassed to put out in the garbage.

Aunt B gave me all her 78 records at one point, a superb collection of big band material of the era. I remember she laughed so hard I thought she’d have a heart attack when I played her Tom Lehrer for the first time, especially cracking up at The Vatican Rag. She wasn’t as religiously strict as her father and was always great fun to be around. In fact, my first father-in-law, an alcoholic himself, fell in love with her after we set them up. I think they had a weekend fling, after which B disappeared into guilt and wouldn’t see him again. She was a complicated, tortured soul. I loved her and listening to her stories.

I remember as a kid, when she was still singing, I loved to visit her because she lived with a drummer. I don’t know if they were married. I liked two things about visiting, both of which my parents disliked (and therefore we seldom visited): when I got up early in the morning, many adults were awake, i.e. the all night party was still going on; and B’s partner let me play the drums, even at 5 in the morning or whatever it was. I understand why my folks wanted to stay away.

I have many memories about my granddad who lived with us. During the big Tehachapi earthquake in 1952, our house shook so much that I fell out of the top bunk to land on top of granddad below. Earlier, in 1950, granddad, who loved to bet the horses at Santa Anita, picked an incredible upset, the gray horse Miche beating the immortal Citation in the San Antonio Handicap. Citation gave up 16 pounds and Miche nipped him at the wire.

I also remember one time my mom got furious at granddad. She caught up looking at the female underwear ads in a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Ah, what an old man had to go through in those distant days before widespread nudity on the Internet.

My aunts on my father’s side were wild. One was the mistress of a Philly neighborhood mob boss, about whom I wrote earlier. Another had many, many husbands, always macho types: a boxer, a daredevil pilot, a Navy seal, an actor/stuntman. She was a pretty good artist herself, charcoal landscapes mainly.

 Those three aunts provided models of women doing things that many women of the time would not dare to do.

Friday, August 8, 2014

1958 / 1988

1958/1988: D at Stanford sent me a letter saying that Tom Lehrer was going to give a concert there. We’d discovered him in high school, buying his first self-recorded album. Why not come up and see him, D suggested. It could be a kind of reunion, midway through our freshman years.

What a great idea! But how to get there? I’d never taken the family car on a long, solo trip before but, to my surprise, after some discussion of the matter, my dad agreed to let me use the Buick Roadmaster and drive to Stanford for the Saturday night concert. We’d come home the next day.

M, one of the high school clan, was eager to come. So were a couple other friends of mine who were Lehrer fans after I introduced them to his songs. We had four, perfect, for the drive north.

The reunion was spectacular, college kids and all, and here I am away from home with the family car, but the concert was strange. Lehrer was late. Over an hour late. Some other entertainers tried to keep the audience engaged, and eventually what appeared to be the Master of Ceremonies came to the mic( to explain the situation. What followed was a highly comic tale of Lehrer’s misfortunes with late planes, stolen tickets, mistaken identity and all number of strange encounters, at the end of which the MC said, So I now present, Mr. Tom Lehrer! He gestured to the wings and walked off -- and turned around and walked right back on and sat down at the piano. Lehrer had given his own hilarious introduction, and all lateness was immediately forgiven. (This was so early in his career, no one recognized him!)

Seeing this concert at Stanford would bring dividends thirty years later.

I had written a new hyperdrama called Cocktail Suite that I also was producing and directing myself. These were three one-acts, each complete in itself, but with major characters who became minor characters in one or more of the other plays. In this way, the audience could sit and see a one-act, or wander with a character, and still get a full evening. I was trying to educate an audience to this radical new kind of theater.

Before the show, I wanted one of our actors to perform Tom Lehrer songs. Just to be safe, I called his publisher about rights. The publisher said Lehrer handles his own and gave me his personal phone number. I had Tom Lehrer’s unlisted phone number!

I phoned and he answered. I could barely speak up. I explained I was doing a play and wanted to use a few of his songs as part of the pre-show entertainment. He said his agent handled all that. Tell me about the play.

Before I did, I let him know what a true fan I was: as a teenager, I had bought his very first self-produced album, and I had seen a concert at Stanford where he had brought down the house with a rambling introduction about why he was over an hour late.

You saw Stanford? This delighted Lehrer no end, and before we said our goodbyes, he gave me permission to use any songs I wanted free, with the caveat that if his agent ever found out, he’d deny speaking to me. We talked for about half an hour, and he was as funny on the phone as he could be in concert.

I used about half a dozen songs, and the show was a hit, both critically and financially for all of us involved, who had created a co-op and, like true commies, divided up the ticket sales. We had negligible expenses so made out very well.

 I remain a Tom Lehrer fan and don’t think any of his several imitators come close to his genius.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

1957

1957: In those days, we weren’t called “nerds.” We were called “brains.” There were five of us, and we were very tight. We called ourselves Future Scientists of America, FSA. During high school hours, we were inseparable and had many science and math classes together at Pasadena High School.

At graduation, our futures looked bright. Two of us were going to Cal Tech, two to Stanford and one to MIT.

But prospects changed quickly. The summer after his freshman year at Cal Tech, my friend and neighbor M committed suicide. Within two years, both myself and J at MIT were in the Army. Only D and E at Stanford continued through to graduation, went on to grad school and got great jobs in research and industry.

The summer after graduation, we have one last gathering, at the lake where D and his parents camp each year. We water ski and swim and hike and, best of all, sit around nighttime campfires arguing about one thing or another, usually some far fetched scientific theory.

I enjoyed camping with D’s family, which I did several summers. His dad was a true eccentric, a high school physics teacher, and D’s home environment was far different from mine. My folks were blue collar at root, despite the Navy career, and music was never played in our house. In the home office of D’s father, classical music was always playing. The room itself had floor to ceiling bookshelves, all physics and math and science books. It was an intellectual atmosphere far from what I experienced at home. I liked being there.

Once D’s father asked D and I if we wanted to join him running errands in town. Why not? D’s father wore shorts, sandals, a Ban the Bomb shirt -- and a football helmet. D Jr. didn’t react to the helmet, so I didn’t. 

Later I learned that the father, the physics teacher, loved to wear an outrageous item of clothing to see how people would react. However, when he tried to leave the house wearing a bra over his shirt, D’s mother said this was going too far.

I quickly lost track of everybody from high school. I’ve never gone to any of my reunions. A few years ago, however, I received an email from D, who had retired and now was living on his small yacht in Florida. He still loved the water. Not too shabby.

E, who went to Stanford, worked in industry (his father was a big oil company executive) and I heard through the grape vine that J at MIT made a career of the Army, although I find that hard to believe. At any rate, of the Future Scientists of America, perhaps D came closest to the lives we had in mind then. I certainly had no notion of becoming a writer. (“You made the right choice,” said D after reading some of my poems. Made me feel good.)

Over the years I had a number of “lost” students, who were depressed because they hadn’t settled on a future, a particular path toward a career, and to these I shared my own long and twisting journey, and I tried to assure them that they should be patient and pay attention and their futures will find them in time. This, late blooming, is one of the great treasures of this country. There are countries where your future is determined when you are a child.

 Take your time, I say, and don’t be too hard on yourself.

Monday, August 4, 2014

1988

1988: I’m about to head out of my studio apartment for Seafood Mama’s when the phone rings. I answer and hear party noise in the background. My friend tells me I need to get over there, a character in a cowboy hat is telling stories about knowing Woody Guthrie. He calls himself Ramblin’ Jack somebody, I forget.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? I ask.
That’s it! You know about this guy?
Instead of answering, I get directions to the party.

Do I know about Elliott? I’ve worshipped the guy for almost 30 years.

My introduction to the music of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was in 1962. His first American album was featured in a full page ad in Sing Out! magazine, to which I subscribed in the Army. (My sergeant thought it was a commie mag, that with a Top Secret Codeword security clearance I should be more careful about what I read, at least in public.) The Prestige album was called Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Sings The Songs Of Woody Guthrie, and a blurb quoted Alan Lomax as saying, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott sounds more like Woody Guthrie than Woody Guthrie. That was good enough for me. I ordered the album.

It took forever to arrive at my address in the Army in Germany. But when it did, I played it constantly and was immediately a fan. I ordered other records by him, which at that time were mainly European recordings. Having these would get me some brownie points later that night in Portland.

Elliott, it turns out, was stranded. He was driving his Winnebago from a Seattle gig to his next gig in San Francisco but his girlfriend got sick, some kind of food poisoning, and she was spending the night in the hospital. He had his rig parked in the lot at The Gypsy, a bar not far from my studio, and had met some folks inside who brought him to the party.

Elliott had another problem. This hospital deal was going to take much of his cash. He needed somewhere he could play and pass the hat. It was midweek, so preferably this weekend.

I came to the rescue, as any true fanatic would. I set up a Friday-Saturday gig for him at the nearby Earth Tavern. Word got out quickly, the Friday crowd was good and the Saturday was a full house, standing room only, and he got enough money passing the hat to get him back on the road.

In the meantime, I got to spend several days with him, with my tape recorder on, Jack agreeing to an interview, which I later turned into an article for Willamette Week, the alternative newspaper. I got a photographer friend to get photos. Jack agreed to do this for two reasons.

First, I was a true fan. I had rare albums of his, including an English recording of San Francisco Bay Blues, and album with banjo player Daryl Adams. Of course, I also had the later material like Guthrie for which he was famous, if belatedly so.

Second, I had seen many of his shows at The Ash Grove in the 1960s. If he came in for a two-week gig, playing 5 days a week, I’d be there for half a dozen of them. I especially liked the midweek shows at The Ash Grove because they were more informal. On weekends, Jack would dress up in his usual cowboy attire but on a Wednesday, he might show up in jeans and a sweat shirt and no cowboy hat at all.

Before his gig, I interview him on tape for hours. Out of curiosity, I ask why he quit playing harmonica on a rack. I always loved his harp. Elliott’s harmonica on New York Town is about as good as it gets in folk music.

His reply saddens me: he got tired of being accused of copying Bob Dylan! And it was Dylan whose first bookings in NYC were billed as the “son of Jack Elliott!” Elliott says that the rack was scratching up his guitar anyway, he just let Dylan have it all to himself.

On Friday afternoon I help Jack do a sound check at the Earth Tavern, and when we’re done I receive an extraordinary gift.

Sitting at the mic on the small stage, he asks, What do you want to hear?

Hard Travelin’.
He plays it.

Just keep them coming, he says. I’ll tell you when I’m done.

And so I do: New York Town, Diamond Joe, Sadie Brown, 1913 Massacre, Tom Joad, Philadelphia Lawyer, San Francisco Bay Blues.

For the next half hour or more, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is taking my requests and performing at his best for an audience of one, yours truly. It’s the most magnificent concert I’ve ever been to.

1997

1997: My first office mate at Portland State University was a retiring professor of American Literature. His passion, I learned, was the work of John Dos Passos.

Before I learned this, I found myself sharing an office with a grumpy, depressed, burned out old man. Only when I learned about his love of Dos Passos, which I shared, did we connect in any way and then I began to understand the causes of his depression.

For starters, no one read Dos Passos any more. The professor believed that the USA trilogy was, and long had been, the Great American Novel everyone was waiting for, and in a few years, upon returning to the work myself, I came to agree with him. But standards in the university had fallen like great redwoods felled in a forest. Literature didn’t seem to matter any more. All of this depressed him greatly, and he wondered if he had wasted his life by dedicating it to the writings of all the authors he loved so much. Did literature matter to the culture any more?

I was just beginning to teach screenwriting. I had all that initial energy and optimism with which I greet most new projects. So while I listened to his complaints, I didn’t agree with them. Only in time would I find myself agreeing with many of them.

John Dos Passos is the perfect example. The USA trilogy, highly experimental in its time, captures this country in the first decades of the 20th century, a time in which we created and defined the American empire and manifest destiny, with all the consequences and disasters to come, like no other work of fiction does: its breadth, its scope, its politics, its humanity and poetry, the trilogy stands alone as an epic presentation of the American people, the American landscape, the American body politic. I recently listened to a brilliantly read audio book of the trilogy, some 50 hours of listening, and the experience is very high on my list of moving, engaging audience experiences.

Why is Dos Passos forgotten today? Because we are a star-of-the-moment culture in all things. How painful, how disappointing and frustrating, to be a retiring Dos Passos scholar in 1997. My first office mate, whose bitterness I can’t forget.

We get sucked into believing this culture actually gives a shit about such things as literature. He did. I did. At times, when the pendulum swings away from commerce and toward art, it almost seems as if we are right. But the pendulum always swings back. Commerce always wins out. The business of America is business, just as the man said.

In fact, John Dos Passos notes that himself. How could he not, in an epic story about the USA?

Saturday, August 2, 2014

1948

1948: First day of third grade. First day of school in my new home, Pasadena. Roll call.

I don’t notice anything different as the teacher calls our names alphabetically. Too nervous. I also don’t notice that the kids, my classmates, are better dressed here than in Dallas, where I went to my first two grades. No one here is barefoot. No one here rode a pony to school.

Then my name gets called. I do what I’ve always done.
I stand up and say, in my southern accent, “Yes, ma’am.”
Immediately the entire class breaks into hysterics.
Immediately I start crying.

The teacher is beside herself, “Children! Children!”

Welcome to Pasadena. Welcome to civilization.

Early on my parents are called in after school. It’s suggested that I take speech therapy after regular classes, along with the other southern kids crowding the Southern California school system. My parents agree.

It works. In a few years I learn how to speak like a human being.

It works so well that a decade later, sitting in a physics class at Cal Tech as a freshman, I am listening to the southern drawl of my professor, “Now we have this here equation …,” thinking, This man sounds like an idiot. No intelligent man speaks with a southern accent.

The brainwashing worked. 

2014

2014: Now and again, and more often as I get older, I feel like I’ve just finished a long road race, one of those 10K or half-marathon Runs for a Cause, a race that draws tens of thousands to the city streets to move as one dedicated mass along a route that weaves in and out of downtown, with crowds to cheer us on along the way, a very organized and well supported Run for a Cause, and I’m right there in the middle, running faster than some, running slower than others, one foot after the other and always with dedication and belief in the cause to which I contribute my energy, my life, one foot after the other, and at the end, with media everywhere, with flash bulbs everywhere, with congratulations everywhere, I finish exhausted but feeling great, confident of a job well done, all the training and dedication paying off, the long haul now justified, a great moment indeed…

…when somebody passing by asks if I’ve heard the terrible news, and this of course ruins the moment, all I can think of is the bomb in Boston, let it not be that, maybe someone had a heart attack, terrible enough but better than a bomb, and I reply, What news is that? and he says, All this is a complete fraud, What? I ask, he says the Cause is a fraud, there is no cause, there is no reason to run this because the cause, the purpose of it all, does not exist, we’ve been sold a bill of goods, we’ve been jacking off, pretending there is a cause but there isn’t any cause, get it?, there is no Run for a Cause because the so-called cause is nothing, it doesn’t exist, and of course it takes a while for me to comprehend this, that all the training, all the discipline, the workouts, the trials, the dedication, all the time I put into this is for naught, the cause is a fraud, there is no cause, this is one hell of a deal, let me tell you …

… so I decide I might as well go home, and so I walk to the bus stop, having checked ahead of time that this route is still running, the race for the cause that doesn’t exist didn’t change my bus route, so I start waiting for the bus, and the bus doesn’t come and I wait and it doesn’t come and I keep waiting and it doesn’t come, and I begin to wonder if the rest of my life will be waiting for a bus that never comes …


Friday, August 1, 2014

1976

1976: Katherine Anne Porter gives a reading at Salisbury State College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A major campus event, and P and I are there.

Porter is old, small, frail; but her mind is all there, her reading clear and energetic. She reads from Pale Horse, Pale Rider and tells stories about Paris in the twenties.

The chair of the English Dept. hosts a post-reading dinner party honoring the famous writer. Because I’m the unofficial “writer in residence” at the college, the chair seats me next to Porter. I consider this a great honor. 

Porter is still full of energy and through dinner she tells me more stories about her life in Paris and elsewhere, the famous writers she’s known, her lovers. She is a fantastic woman.

Dinner ends but Porter talks on. Eventually we are the only two left at the table, the rest of the faculty having moved into the living room for socializing and, of course, drinking, the department sport. Through this, Porter tells me story after story, and I’m a captivated audience.

At one point there is a loud crash in the living room. A drunken faculty member has knocked over a lamp.

Porter, hearing this, grabs my forearm and squeezes it. She leans close and says, in a tone full of curiosity and concern ….

 “Why are people throwing things?”