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Archive for the category “Writing”

26 Jan 2013

hey jealousy (a short story in dialogue)

hey jealousy

Hey jealousy
She took my heart
Well there’s only one thing I couldn’t start

–Gin Blossoms

Lakeshore Records

Lakeshore Records (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Lexie? Is that you?”

“Mark? My God, I thought you were dead.”

“Oh, no. Nothing that serious. Just got a little dizzy after working out in the hotel fitness room. Guess I was dehydrated. I’ll be out in time to catch my plane. But, wow, how amazing to see you here, Lexie.”

“No. I mean I thought you’d died years ago. At the lake. When the Wheelers’ boat sank.”

“What? Well, obviously, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“But—”

“You look fantastic. As beautiful as the picture of you I’ve kept all this time. I’ll bet you’re an amazing nurse. Such gentle hands you had. I remember. I’ve never forgotten those weeks at the lake, the walks we took on the shore, sitting at the edge of the pier and talking so long we got sunburned. Sneaking out behind the back of the boathouse at night. That was a…special time. You were special.”

“But, Mark—”

“Sometimes I wish we could go back, don’t you? Life seemed simpler and sweeter then, without all the obligations, the fuss, the stress. You know what I mean?”

“Mmm.”

“You must have married, Lexie. I see a ring. Any children? Can you believe Veronica and I are celebrating our 30th at the end of the year? Frannie, our oldest, is married, teaching in Kentucky—Kentucky, for crying out loud. But she’s pregnant, so I doubt that will last much longer. God, I’ll be a grandfather soon. And Paul is almost through med school. ‘My son, the doctor.’ What a cliché, huh?”

“Veronica?”

“Of course you remember Veronica. You two were best friends. She’ll be so surprised when I tell her I saw you.”

“Surprised? Yes, I think she’ll be quite surprised.”

“What’s the matter, Lexie?”

“Tell me about Frannie. How old is she? What’s she like?”

“She’s twenty-nine. Pretty and smart. Hell-bent on having a career before settling down to raise kids. Didn’t want to be like her mother, getting married and having babies before she finished college.”

“And how is Veronica these days?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Stays busy with the house and the cabin. And she has her committee work with the arts guild and a couple other groups. Right now she’s in Kentucky helping Frannie get ready for the baby. We’re both excited about our first grandchild.”

“Why didn’t you ever call me, Mark? Or write?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to. You’d met someone else, hadn’t you? It was Veronica, come to think of it, who told me you’d left with him. I was in shock when she told me, Lex, to tell you the truth. I’d thought you cared about me the way I did about you.”

“I left the lake because my mother fell and broke her arm and needed my help at home. You were off hiking with some of the other guys, so I wrote a note and gave it to Veronica to give you. She came to visit me a few weeks later. I trusted her, so I confided in her. She told me about the accident with the Wheelers’ boat.”

“Yes, that was a terrible thing. Mr. Wheeler’s youngest son, Petey, drowned.”

“But you weren’t on the boat.”

“No.”

“And you and Veronica?”

“Rebound kind of thing, I guess. And then she got pregnant, so we got married right away.”

“Well, I have some other patients to attend to. It was good to see you.”

“Lexie?”

“Say ‘Hi’ to Veronica for me. And just so you know, Mark, your first grandchild is four years old. His name is Kevin and he takes after his father. We’re celebrating his baby sister’s first birthday next week. Michaela looks just like her mother did at that age.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Veronica Rose. Your oldest daughter’s name is Veronica Rose, but we call her Ronnie. She has your eyes. Same bright blue; same long, dark lashes. I remember, too, Mark. I remember every day. I’ll get someone else to look in on you now.”

Posted in Unpublished 'til Now, Writing and tagged , , | Leave a comment
19 Jan 2013

Lost in Space Again

October 18, 1989 (Loma Prieta Earthquake)

photograph of a collapsed facade of a building...

photograph of a collapsed facade of a building near Beach and Divisadero Streets in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sabina held the dress up in front of herself and looked into the full-length mirror. Then she turned to me.

“That’s nice,” I said. “It makes you look like Gena Rowlands.” Gena Rowlands?

Sabina’s hair was much longer and pulled back into a pony tail. The shop we were in consisted of three rooms, sort of large walk-in closets. There were no salespeople in sight. I don’t remember if Sabina bought the dress. She is real, but the rest was a dream.

When I told her friend Lee about it, she said Sabina was supposed to be shopping for a dress for a wedding next month. So I described the dream dress in as much detail as I could. Now Sabina’s trying to find this dress that will make her look like Gena Rowlands.

As for me, I’m trying to find the man who wandered into Sabina’s kitchen while I was sitting alone at her table after our shopping expedition. His hair was full and dark, his skin a light olive. He was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and dark pants. He sat down across the table from me and started speaking in a low-friendly voice.

I was preoccupied and kept asking him to repeat himself. He told me his name was Roy Walli and even spelled it: W-A-L-L-I. He said he liked jazz and played the oud. When I related this scene to a musician friend, he told me the oud is a lute-shaped Arabic instrument and that playing jazz on it would be difficult but not impossible.

After a short time, Roy got up to go. He apologized, saying he hadn’t meant to bother me. Suddenly, I didn’t want him to leave and protested that he wasn’t bothering me at all. He didn’t appear to believe me. After he left, I drank some white wine through a straw from an oversized goblet. Then I tried to look him up in the phone book. It had an unusually large number of sections, but his name wasn’t in any of them. Later, looking through a second-story window, I saw his name on an old-fashioned sign—the kind an auto repair shop might have—on a red brick building. It felt like a dead end.

Should I run an ad in the Pacific Sun? “Divorced white female, age 43, seeks literal man of her dreams.”

Saturday was the night of the full moon. I didn’t sleep very well. My stomach was churning, my heart was pounding, and my head ached vaguely. I seemed to wake up every half hour. Deep in the middle of the night, I found myself in an unfamiliar large two-story wooden house. I was looking through another second-story window watching the full-moon rise. My friend was asleep, but I called him over to the window to track the huge luminous moon’s ascent behind two distant hills.

He wasn’t much interested in the moon and went back to bed. I continued to stare out the window, maybe a little hypnotized. As the moon rose, it seemed to grow larger instead of smaller, and to cast more and more light. All at once, it was huge and glowing, and I could see splotches of color and texture: mauves and blues and purples stood out against the pearly white ground. A large round white cloud served as a gauzy backdrop behind it.

The moon cast so much light that far-away planets became visible. Everything outside the window took on the surreal appearance of a charcoal sketch. Nothing was in color anymore, and none of the normal daytime landscape was visible. Jupiter, trailing some kind of vapor, and Saturn and its rings were so close I could almost stretch out my arm and touch them.

I was awestruck, but the thought I might be the only one seeing it made me feel very isolated and deeply disturbed. I had a sense of all these huge planets, including the earth, floating in space with nothing to anchor them. It was disorienting and frightening. I felt as if I really could fall off the edge of the Earth.

Gradually, the moon rose higher in the sky, finally becoming smaller, its light dimming. The planets disappeared from sight and the world outside returned to normal. I must have stayed up all night because it was morning by then.

My friend and I woke up around seven o’clock, talked a little, and made love. He got up, but I fell back asleep. When I woke up the second time, alone, I could still see the clear, grey outline of Jupiter in the sky, and that sense of floating freely in space, unanchored, wouldn’t go away.

Yesterday, at four minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon, I was in Mill Valley, working alone at the far end of Sabina’s studio when the earth shook half a dozen marble slabs off the walls and sent them crashing down onto her desk and her paints and the floor. I don’t know where she was—maybe still looking for that dress. And I don’t know where Roy Walli was, either. Who was that guy, and just what was it he was trying to tell me that I was too preoccupied to hear? All I really got for sure was his name.

Posted in Memoir, Unpublished 'til Now, Writing | Leave a comment
29 Dec 2012
2 Comments

Terry, on the outside

If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

― Saul Bellow, Herzog

Saul Bellow, Miami Book Fair International, 19

Saul Bellow  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1965, television carried the sights and sounds of the bloody march on Selma, Alabama into living rooms across the country. Agitation over the Vietnam War was breaking out on campuses and in city streets, in both small towns and big cities. But the Stonewall riots were a few years away, and gay liberation was not yet on our collective radar screen. So it really isn’t odd that my first gay friend never came out to me and likely never even realized I knew he was gay.

Terry was medium-tall, about 25 pounds overweight, ruddy-skinned, with close-cropped dark, curly hair. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses that gave him, alternately, the look of a scholar or of a mad scientist. He lived in a wealthy suburb with his adoptive parents. The woman who gave birth to him was a distant relative of theirs. She lived in an apartment above a downtown department store, where Terry used to visit her. He seemed ambivalent about all three of these people.

I was attending college, but Terry wasn’t a student. He was part of the local theater scene, of which I was a hanger-on by virtue of being friends with some student actors. We were a loose-knit group of about a dozen kids with mixed economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Terry was energetic, sardonic, funny, and engaging. He amused and entertained everyone, often making himself the butt of his own jokes. But he could participate with equal aplomb in the deep, philosophical inquiries of the undergrad set. I found him more comfortable and easier to be with than most people I’d known all my life. We also found each other reasonably attractive and indulged in some innocent—although not harmless—necking. (I once contracted a serious case of mono from him that that required three days of hospitalization and a month of recuperation.)

Unless you’re completely exploded, there’s always something to be grateful for.

 ― Saul Bellow, Herzog

During most of this time, I had a stuttering romance going with David, a thin, intense, brooding young actor/student who appeared to survive on caffeine, aspirin, cigarettes, vitamins, and cereal. David, Terry, and I hung out together, often occupying booths or counter space in one of the all-night restaurants that were so much more common back then. We talked constantly, logging thousands of hours of conversation in person or over the telephone. We were into the novels of John Updike and Saul Bellow, so I imagine we discussed Rabbit Angstrom, George Caldwell (The Centaur), and Moses Herzog.

Some people, if they didn’t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

 ― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

One night in the middle of winter, Terry and I were driving around in a car I had borrowed. I forget why, but it was suddenly imperative to him to lay his hands on some money. He knew the combination to the safe in his father’s business office, so he decided to break into it. But first I had to return the car, which meant we were on foot more than 25 miles from his father’s office.

We slogged several miles across icy streets and sidewalks, growing increasingly numb from the cold, to the home of Marian-the-Librarian. Marian was the head of the Children’s Department of the public library, where I had once worked, and we were still friends. But she was in her 60s and lived alone, so I’m surprised she even opened her door. But she let us in, gave us something hot to drink, and agreed to lend us cab fare.

The cab dropped us off at a restaurant, where we ordered coffee. Terry downed his quickly and set off to try to find another car. Hours passed, though, as the waitress kept refilling my cup and giving me sympathetic looks. I realized Terry wasn’t going to return, but I didn’t have enough money to pay for the two coffees.

Eventually it got to be morning, and I called a friend to come pick me up and pay for the coffee. I never learned the outcome of that particular escapade, but it was adventures like that that often earned Terry time alone for reflection behind one set of locked doors or another.

He had several stints in the state mental hospital, from which he wrote me regularly. One weekend, David and I drove halfway across the state to see him. It was a warm, sunny, summer day, and David and I were both in a good mood. We made up names for fictional characters by combining place names from a roadmap: Crystallia Goodheart (heroine), Joppa Scott (villain), Sagola Volney (possible pen name for me). We fantasized about starting a business to provide characters (names and descriptions) to lazy novelists.

It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.

― Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

Terry was delighted to see us, garrulous and clowning around as usual: jovial tour guide of the nut house. Once he was released, the three of us picked up where we’d left off.

A few years later, he started talking about moving to Boston and making oblique references to a “marriage of convenience.” I assumed he never elaborated because he thought I didn’t know what he was talking about. It didn’t occur to me that he might have enjoyed being mysterious. In any case, he wanted me to move to Boston, too, and I considered the idea. But I ended up going to California instead, and we lost track of each other after that.

Out of the blue, during the winter of 1977, I started thinking about Terry quite a bit. I felt a strong urge to find out where he was and what he was up to, but I didn’t follow up on it for several months. His adoptive parents were no longer listed in the phone book, for one thing, and I was out of touch with everyone else who’d known him. But the urge persisted, and eventually I located the name and address of a possible relative. I wrote to him asking for Terry’s current address.

The man turned out to be Terry’s uncle. He called me as soon as he got my letter to tell me Terry had committed suicide in Boston six months earlier—right around the time I’d started thinking about him again.

I don’t delude myself that if I’d found a way to get in touch with Terry earlier he wouldn’t have killed himself. That would be presumptuous. There’s no way for me to know what was actually going on with him. But when I found out what had happened, I felt like a member of a mountain-climbing expedition who got distracted and looked away. And in that moment of looking away, I failed to see another member of the party lose his footing and fall, fatally, to earth.

We are funny creatures. We don’t see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.

― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

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Posted in Memoir, Unpublished 'til Now, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
22 Dec 2012
4 Comments

sweet dreams

Guitar player at Section 3

Guitar player at Section 3 (Photo credit: Dennisworld)

Some got clean, and even though you knew the blood, sweat, commitment, and years that had taken, it still felt like a fall-down-on-your-knees miracle every time. Some died (overdose, accident, murder, disease).

Mark did both.

He walked into his first detox group at the methadone clinic wearing a grey fedora cocked at a jaunty angle—swaggering but humble, willing but stubborn, in-your-face but respectful—giving off sparks that hinted he could accomplish the next-to-impossible. He could get clean. I began to wonder, how can I prove to myself that I am real and a part of this mad world I had been watching through blurry rain-soaked glass?

He got into the methadone maintenance program and I was assigned as his counselor. He defied everyone else’s expectations, but not his and not mine. Happy Valentine’s Day. You gave me (didn’t you?) hope.

Mark was in and out of jail while he was on methadone and wrote me long letters from his cell. I wonder if anyone knows how much or how useless this place really is for someone like me.

Otherwise, he lived in his car, an older model orange BMW he cherished. He was a heat-seeking missile bent on getting laid, so he had to keep up appearances. Almost got some today. My friend Kelly was being awful affectionate.

When his guitars weren’t in hock, he played bass, so he had that musician cachet going for him. And at one point, he owned two vehicles: the BMW he drove and a green Volvo he slept and stored his belongings in. I’m sitting here in my Volvo and my alarm starts sounding, but I can’t find my clock, right? So I’m digging all around and I’m finding all kinds of stuff I’ve been looking for, but the clock is still beeping, and I can’t tell where from. I finally find it in the back under some clothes, and what does it say—“Group Men’s 5:30 pm.” Whoops. Late again.

Mark’s openness was sometimes unnerving. Baring all doesn’t bother me because that’s how you will know who I am.

My expectations for him were relentlessly high. He attended two groups and two individual counseling sessions each week. I get a lot of encouragement from you, and seeing you keeps my commitment to you to stay clean fresh in my mind. I know I will have to be able to do that on my own, but isn’t that what recovery is about—support while you learn how to be strong without drugs?

We pushed each other’s buttons and challenged each other to dig deeper, to try again—try harder, try something else, something new—to push through it (whatever “it” was), to extend ourselves further, both within our respective roles and outside of them. I became a better counselor because Mark forced me to get real with him. All I can do is tell you how I feel about it and hope you see that it is as important to hear what you’ve been through as it is to tell you my story or feelings.

He got off dope. I was thinking about how dumb it was when I used to get depressed, and I would go out and use depressants to try and not be depressed, and they just made me more depressed. Duh!

After a community service gig revealed his talent for working with computers and he started earning money, he rented an apartment and got a cat. When he tapered off the methadone program after two years, clean (but not entirely sober), it was unusual enough that everyone on staff signed a congratulations card for him. Maybe my situation is almost the same, but the way I see the world and the way I make decisions and the way I feel about myself is all different. Cool, huh? Well, I think so, anyway.

Of course, Mark’s road had more rough patches, but he was never homeless again. I’m at a point where I’m just glad to be here, no matter why I’m here or what I’m doing.

And when he got together with Leslie, it was as if the last star in his personal constellation had finally fallen into alignment. Someday I’ll meet someone that I can be with who is what I’m longing for, and I can be for them the same. Not to try and make someone happy, but to augment their life and them mine.

Mark never relapsed to heroin. Haven’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t, won’t, can’t and shouldn’t use.

It was alcohol that did him in. He was a maintenance drinker, and in spite or because of health problems, including Hepatitis C, from years of drug abuse and poor medical care, he wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t completely give up beer. He was 56 when his liver failed, 15 years after he came to the clinic. Well, I’m beat. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sweet dreams. Love, Mark.

I don’t know how many of my former clients are still clean (too few!) or how many are now dead (too many!). The others who I know have died—Jim, Dylan, Scott, Ray, Mark S, Alex, Rocky, and Russ—were all luminous and maddening souls. Each one fought hard—with humor and determination. Each one lifted me up, pissed me off, made me proud, and broke my heart. Each one infused me with enough hope to try again with someone else. Their passing has left holes in the world, openings you can sometimes glimpse when you look up into the night sky.

Sweet dreams, you guys. I’ll see you tomorrow. Love, Joycelyn.

Posted in Journal Writing, Memoir, Writing and tagged , , ,
15 Dec 2012
6 Comments

what i’ve lost

RC Jones

RC Jones

Losing someone who has been an integral part of your life for years or even decades is an enormous loss, of course. But that enormous loss is really an accumulation of many smaller losses you only begin to recognize over time.

In the year after my partner of 30 years died, when I began to notice those small losses accumulating, I completed a long-list journal writing exercise to enumerate them. To acknowledge them. To help me understand.

Chances are you’ve lost someone as important to you as he was to me, and you have your own list of what that looks and feels like.

what i’ve lost

Someone to:

  • Come home to
  • Complain to
  • Hang out, watch TV, and read the Sunday papers with
  • Make scones for
  • Pick me up from work
  • Share my life
  • Share my time
  • Get grumpy with
  • Walk with & hike with
  • Shop with
  • Be indignant with (and about)
  • Share the sunset with
  • Remember 30 years with
  • Do projects with
  • Learn and grow with
  • Care for
  • Talk to
  • Share space with
  • Complain about
  • Figure things out with
  • Make plans with
  • Discover things with
  • Have holidays with
  • Share food with
  • Take care of the car
  • Return my books to the library and take my clothes to the cleaners
  • Make meal plans and grocery lists with
  • Watch DVDs with
  • Watch football games with
  • Have quirky habits with
  • Laugh with
  • Hope for
  • Nag
  • Have serious discussions with
  • Make me birthday cards
  • Play Scrabble with
  • Take for granted
  • Look out the window and watch for
  • Do the messy chores
  • Worry about
  • Buy Valentine’s Day cards for
  • Remember my birthday
  • Watch a fire in the fireplace with

Someone who:

  • Was always there
  • Knew me for better and worse and still stuck around
  • Wanted me to listen to his music
  • Took care of all the plants
  • Supported me 100%
  • Could fix almost anything
  • Would read my writing and give me GOOD feedback
  • Was smarter than me
  • Liked to cook (and was great at it)
  • Was willing to clean up the kitchen, do the dishes, and take out the trash
  • Listened to me, almost anytime
  • I could tell about my day
  • Always told me about his day
  • Was interested in what I was interested in
  • Got along with my mother (!)
  • Moved to Albuquerque with me
  • Offered to tell me bedtime stories
  • Used headphones for TV at night so he wouldn’t disturb me
  • Made the best of the situation
  • Forgave me
  • Always gave me his full attention
  • I could buy little surprises for
  • Remembered more of our past together than I do
  • Loved me unconditionally
  • Missed me when I went away
  • Picked me up at the airport, no matter what time
  • Filled the patio with blooming cactus plants
  • Accepted my shortcomings
  • Subscribed to interesting magazines
  • Was the one to go out to pick up our take-out food
  • Was nice to my friends
  • Made sure my coffee was ground exactly the way I liked it
  • Called me “babe”
  • Grilled the chicken, sliced the avocados, sharpened the knives
  • Apologized after an argument
  • Gave me my space
  • Noticed butterflies
  • Introduced me to so many different things
  • Cast his lot in with mine
  • Put up with my periodic insanity
  • Saved things
  • Was more sentimental than I am
  • Gave more than he got
  • Needed me
  • Trimmed my bangs
  • Took the cat to the vet
  • Worried about how I would get along without him
  • Supported me financially when I needed it
  • Drank way too much Diet Coke
  • Could be really silly
  • Had an eye for beauty
  • Was always writing letters to the editor in his head and then “reading” them to me
  • Watched the 10:00 news religiously
  • Hung all the pictures on the walls
  • Liked to talk…and talk…and talk
  • Tried to tell me jokes disguised as anecdotes because I hate jokes
  • Never liked to take the last of anything
  • Could never purchase just one apple, orange, or head of garlic
  • Loved the smell of roasting chiles in the fall
  • Still appreciated the bathrobe I got for him after wearing it for seven years
  • Said he liked hanging out with me
  • Made really good banana bread
  • Lived with a lot of physical pain but tried not to let it get in the way
  • Wore a hat I crocheted for him back in the 80s
  • Loved to look at the changing light across the Sandias
  • Could see into the center of things
  • Was proud of me
  • Was enchanted by snow and luminarias
  • Had a sparkle in his eye
  • Laughed with abandon
  • Had an amazing book and record collection

He was:

  • A poet
  • A writer
  • An artist
  • A gardener
  • A musician
  • A spiritual companion
  • A partner in life
  • My best friend
  • My heart

And I still miss him.

Posted in Journal Writing, Memoir, Writing
08 Dec 2012
3 Comments

eve dreams (novel excerpt)

An excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Skin of Glass.

Red sunset

Red sunset (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Eve dreams she’s naked and nailed to a wooden cross on the side of a hill. The rest of the hillside is planted and staked with symmetrical rows of grapevines. The sun is setting straight ahead of her and the cloud-filled sky is a tumultuous gothic wash of purples, golds, mauves, and deep blues. It reminds her of the sky on the holy pictures she collected when she was eight or nine years old and stuck between the pages of the prayer book her grandmother in Illinois sent her. To the right and down the hill there’s a small clearing with wooden tables and benches where a group of people is having a party or a picnic. She recognizes the voices: her mother, her father, Nana and Jack, and her cousins, aunts, and uncle. Ethan and Jesse are there, too. They’re talking and laughing among themselves, paying no attention to her. As the sky darkens, they light some small candles.

Eve isn’t cold and she doesn’t feel any pain, but she can’t bear being so exposed and powerless.

When the sun finally sets, there’s no moon. The only light comes from the candles, which begin to flicker wildly as a warm wind moves toward the table. The wind snuffs out first the candles, then the voices. When Eve can no longer see or hear anyone, calmness settles over her. She slips free of the nails and glides, like a bird on a current of air, away from the hillside, away from everyone, into the darkness and something unknown.

Eve wakes up suffused with the memory of flying and of freedom. But she’s stuck fast, pinned like a butterfly to the bed, where Ethan’s right leg and arm hold her down. She thinks the phone might have rung, looks at the clock, tries to adjust her legs. It’s only eight thirty. And it’s Saturday. She closes her eyes and sinks back into sleep.

The ringing phone wakes her again and Ethan stirs, allowing her to move his arm and leg so she can get out of bed. She grabs a T-shirt, pulls it over her head, and hurries down the hall, brushing hair out of her eyes.

“Hi, honey.” Her father’s voice is low. “Did I wake you?”

“It’s OK, Dad; I should be up anyway.”

“I just wanted to confirm I’m picking you up at six-thirty tonight.”

Eve is instantly wary. That’s the time he always picks her up for dinner.

“Were you out last night? I called but your machine picked up.”

She can tell he’s making an effort to keep it casual, but her muscles still tense and she grips the phone tighter. “Dad! Are you checking up on me?” Of course, if she weren’t keeping things from him she wouldn’t have this problem. She makes an effort to soften her tone. “Hey, where are we going tonight, anyway?”

Silence.

“Dad?”

“Your choice, honey. I’ll see you at six-thirty.”

She hangs up. The weight of his concern feels like a force of gravity, anchoring her to the ground, making her clumsy and slow.

She stops briefly in the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet, and looks at the bottle of Valium. Then she closes the cabinet door, pads back to the bedroom, and climbs into bed beside Ethan. Now awake, he nuzzles her chin with his beard, kisses the hollow of her neck.

“Who was it?”

“My father.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to talk to me. If the two of you are so interested in each other, why don’t you just get together and stop using me as a go-between?” She regrets taking out her frustration on Ethan as soon as the words leave her mouth.

“You know I’m not interested in your father,” Ethan says, evenly. “I only ask out of self defense.”

She sighs. The tightness at the base of her skull means the start of a headache. Ethan lifts her T-shirt away from her breasts and lightly licks a nipple until it hardens. He’s in the process of pulling the T-shirt over her head when the phone rings again. With another sigh, Eve takes hold of her shirt and pulls it back down. As she starts to get out of bed, Ethan reaches an arm around her waist to keep her there. “Let it ring. Daddy Dearest can wait.”

She pushes his arm away, gets up, and walks back down the hall. She returns a few seconds later. “It’s for you.”She pulls her terrycloth robe from the hook on the back of the door and heads to the bathroom.

In the shower, Eve lets the hot water beat against her neck and shoulders, as she examines a nickel-sized dark purple bruise on her hip that flares dramatically against her milky white skin, trying to remember how she got it. A smaller bruise on her right elbow, where she smacked it against the doorframe, is already fading. She’s been so uncoordinated lately. She tests the outside of her thigh for soreness, then takes a long time washing every part of her body.

When she shuts off the water and pushes back the shower curtain, she finds Ethan braced against the sink, staring at her. He’s wearing the dark blue bathrobe she gave him for Christmas, which he keeps in her apartment. He’s holding a mug of steaming coffee that he hands it to her without comment. She turns her body sideways as she steps out of the shower, hoping he hasn’t noticed her latest bruise. She accepts the mug and takes a couple of sips before handing it back and drying herself off with a large white towel.

As he watches, she wraps another towel around her wet hair and puts her bathrobe on.

“Do you want to know why she called?”

“I don’t even want to know that she exists, Ethan! Why would I want to know why she called?”

“Eve…”

“She’s the mother of your child. She has 24-hour access to you. She has my fucking telephone number!” As if from a distance, Eve listens to herself losing control. She yanks the towel away from her head and throws it on the floor. She grabs her brush and furiously tugs at her tangled wet hair. The day has already slipped away from her, spinning off into a gloomy darkness, yet she’s powerless to dial down the stridency in her voice. She can’t ask Ethan to stay, even though that’s what she wants to do. Her face sets in a hard, closed expression.

Ethan goes into the bedroom, where Eve hears him getting dressed. She’s still brushing her hair when he reappears in the doorway. “I have to go.”

“Of course you do.” This is the one Saturday of the month Ethan doesn’t have Molly. Correction: the one Saturday he wasn’t supposed to have her.

“I’ll call you this afternoon. Do you want me to pick something up later for dinner?”

She shakes her head. “I’m having dinner with my father.”

“Ah.” He nods.

She looks at his reflection in the mirror and feels the air between them thicken, the space between them expand. She wants to touch him, to say something, but she’s stuck to this spot and he feels too far away, already gone.

She hears his footsteps on the bare wooden floor, the thud of the front door closing. She puts her hairbrush down, opens the medicine cabinet, and takes out the bottle of Valium. She washes down two pills with the cooling coffee from the mug Ethan left on the counter. As she swallows the rest of the coffee, she closes her eyes, leans against the edge of the sink, and tries to remember what she dreamed about this morning—something good, wasn’t it? Something about flying.

Posted in Novel Excerpt, Writing
06 Dec 2012
5 Comments

you can’t have too many keywords

This is a post from my other blog, Nine Paths (exploring the highways and byways of the Enneagram), It’s pretty popular over there, and since I wrote about journaling here last time, I decided to rerun it. I’m currently working (journaling) with a list of keywords I’ve come up with as a result of some list-making exercises. I have to say that keyword journaling has probably been the most profound journaling I’ve ever done.

~ ~ ~

KEYWORDS:
THE MADELEINES OF JOURNAL WRITING

Marcel Proust in 1900

Marcel Proust (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before starting this post, I went into the closet in my office in search of three plastic sandwich bags full of folded slips of different colored paper with words typed on them. I’ve used those bags (and words) in my own creative writing exercises as well as in writing workshops. I found one bag full of lime green nouns, one bag full of fuchsia verbs, and one bag full of teal adjectives. I opened the teal bag without recalling what kind of words were inside and pulled out new. New is good—and so apt for the beginning of a post!

I’ve been playing around with individual words and phrases for decades. My Stance Keyword Comparison Checklist was an outgrowth of a long-term fascination with arranging and grouping words that seem to evoke a concept or a mood or an attitude or a way of being. Sometimes it’s easier to gauge your reaction to a list of keywords than it is to read through narrative descriptions. A single word can send you off on a journey, much like the madeleine that sent Marcel Proust off in Remembrance of Things Past.

When I was a substance abuse counselor, I used a two-page handout called “How Do You Feel Today?” It consisted of 140 words that described feeling states, each one illustrated by what was essentially an emoticon (although I’m pretty sure the handout pre-dated emoticons). It wasn’t in color, but it looked a little like this example (without the misspelling).

Then I came across a laminated poster based on the same concept, but with far fewer than 140 feeling words and emoticons. It was standard practice at the beginning of group sessions at the clinic for everyone to take turns checking in to let the group know how they were doing and what had transpired since the previous week. I wondered what would happen if we switched to using the feeling words poster in place of the usual check-in. So one day I stuck the poster on a wall and asked everyone to take a long look at it before sitting down so they could find the word that best represented how they were feeling or the state they were in at that moment.

The results were amazing and quite profound. Check-in took a fraction of the time. No one felt compelled to elaborate. And we all agreed we had a much better sense of what was going on with each person than we’d had with the standard check-ins. My take was that having to come up with a single word caused them to really focus and get in touch with how they were doing on a deeper level. It helped them make a transition so they could be fully present at the start of the session. It seemed that previously it had taken the entire check-in period before everyone was “present.” So, by unanimous agreement, we stuck with the feeling words check-in from then on.

Keyword Journaling Exercises

Keywords can be incorporated into a number of different journal writing exercises and techniques. A few suggestions:

  • Use a single keyword or a string of keywords as a prompt for timed flow writing.
  • Mind-map a keyword (as an option, when your mind-map is complete, finish with a period of timed flow writing).
  • Make a grab bag like my plastic sandwich bags by cutting out slips of paper and writing keywords on them. Pull one out at random to use as a writing prompt.
  • Create a sentence or a question around a keyword to use as a writing prompt.

Related:

Posted in Journal Writing, Writing and tagged , , , ,
04 Dec 2012
6 Comments

diaries, journals, and revelations

Diary

Diary (Photo credit: Barnaby)

I filled numerous diaries during elementary and high school, divulging my deepest secrets alongside the mundane details of everyday life. I had one-year diaries and five-year diaries. Some were gilt-edged, while others were plain. But no matter how simple or ornate, they all had locks.

When I was 11 or 12, one of my younger brothers rummaged through my dresser drawers and managed to find, unlock, and read my diary. When I complained to my mother, she told me to put it somewhere he couldn’t find it. I thought this unfair and unreasonable, so I consulted a higher authority: Ann Landers. Ann did not publish my letter, but she did write back agreeing with me and suggesting how I might approach this issue with my mother. I showed the letter to Mom, but she was not moved to alter her position. At least I felt vindicated.

Those old diaries are long gone. I switched to college-ruled spiral-bound notebooks somewhere along the way and started referring to them as journals rather than diaries.

My mother used to read excerpts to me from the five-year diary she’d filled between the ages of 16 and 21, which I think was the only diary she ever kept. The passages she read revealed a rebellious streak it may have been unwise of her to share with me, given her ongoing attempts to get me to conform to various social standards.

After she died, I got custody of her diary and read all of it in the course of a week. I’m so grateful to have it for the glimpses it provides of the young girl and young woman she was before becoming a wife and a mother. She missed writing only two or three days in the entire five years, filling every narrow line with both facts and impressions in her tiny, precise handwriting.

My own journals have been much less devoted to facts than to speculating, imagining, complaining, whining, planning, philosophizing, analyzing, rationalizing, and wishful thinking. Although I wrote in my notebooks regularly for years, it was in a very undisciplined manner. Some entries are so self-indulgent they make me cringe to read them. I’m mortified at the thought anyone else might see them. Twice I’ve ritually destroyed all the journals in my possession (once melodramatically and once thoughtfully). Even so, those journals were my faithful companions, and I derived much benefit from them.

After I encountered Ira Progoff’s book At a Journal Workshop, I began using journal writing in a deeper and more creative manner. I’ve subsequently gotten inspiration and direction from many other books and courses. When I worked as a substance abuse counselor, I realized that the practice of writing might be beneficial for my clients. We experimented with writing first in one group and then in another. Initially, some people were skeptical of the process and diffident about their writing ability, but journal writing doesn’t require talent, only willingness and honesty. Almost everyone responded positively to the writing exercises, and a few began keeping their own private journals. Sometimes the results were absolutely breathtaking, surprising both the writer and me.

When I returned home to California after my mother’s funeral, I wrote to her in my journal every night for several weeks. It helped me say good-by to her, which I had not had the opportunity to do before she died. It made me aware of the connection that will always exist between us. I did the same thing after my partner of nearly 30 years died. Journal writing has helped me get through the most difficult losses of my life.

I’m still writing in college-lined, spiral-bound notebooks. Still using my journals as a way to sort things out, understand myself and my world better, and gain perspective on whatever issues I’m dealing with. I’ve cut down on the whining, complaining, and rationalizing, but I haven’t eliminated them completely. My journals are still my faithful companions—a little reproachful from time to time, but generally nonjudgmental.

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Posted in Journal Writing, Memoir, Writing and tagged , , , , ,
01 Dec 2012

how i misspent my youth

This is the second guest post from Rich Jones, who previously shared some ramblings on his place of employment, an antique store (what’s the big deal with Charles Bukowski?). Here he offers a few brief episodes from his aimlessly misspent youth in San Francisco in the late 60s/early 70s—which back then was probably the best city in the world in which to aimlessly misspend one’s youth. They may remind you of the old adage God watches out for drunks and fools.

Looking east down Geary Boulevard from 36th Av...

Looking east down Geary Boulevard from 36th Avenue. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

will work for weed

When I was thirteen, I got my first job delivering the morning paper with a couple of school chums, brothers who dealt marijuana on the side and paid me a lid per month instead of cash to help them with the route. I’d get up at 3:00am and bike to the corner where the distributor dumped the papers; then the three of us would sit around inserting adverts and folding and loading the papers into a canvas shoulder bag while smoking dope. We’d hit the pavement by around 4:00am.

We delivered papers in one of the tonier neighborhoods in San Franciso—Presidio Heights—which includes a gated cul-de-sac, Presidio Terrace, on Arguello Boulevard. Among others, it was home to then Mayor Joseph Alioto and then Supervisor, now Senator, Diane Feinstein. We had to go door-to-door once a month to collect the subscription fees. Oddly enough, the greatest concentration of deadbeat accounts, those who “paid by mail,” but in fact didn’t pay at all, was within the Terrace.

Eventually, the brothers got tired of the paper route, so I took it over as a sort of sub-contractor, still working for marijuana. I really enjoyed that job; I liked the deserted streets, the cool morning air, the walking around, and of course, the dope smoking. Unfortunately, I lost it after about a year when the paper consolidated routes and began requiring car ownership for delivery people. But it was fun while it lasted.

boots in the sand (stoner version)

When I was still in junior high, I cut school a lot to hang out with an older group of stoners. They liked to hang out in Lincoln Park, near the southwest corner of China Beach, a place called Eagle Point. It was near a contemporary style wood-sided house occupied at the time by members of a local rock group known as “The Jefferson Airplane.”

One evening, some of my friends and I were out there drinking beer and smoking pot, when I felt the call of nature, got up, and staggered downhill. Coming around a bush, I suddenly found myself treading air and plummeting down the cliff face, too drunk to be scared until I was well on my way. I was wearing a three-quarter-length leather jacket I’d scored at a thrift store only weeks before, which kept me from shredding my back against the rocky shale as I slid down.

As luck would have it, the tide was coming in, and I landed up to my knees in partially liquefied beach sand. The sand was like glue, and the only way I could move was to step out of the pair of knee-high suede cowboy boots I’d spent several months of odd job wages on (earned in the underground economy of the time) at a surplus store on Market Street. Totally shaken and scared witless, I half crawled, half waded through frigid, knee-deep water to China Beach, weighed down by my wet clothes and the leather jacket. From there, I managed to walk from 28th Avenue to 10th Avenue and Anza Street in wet woolen boot socks, raising a set of blisters the size of Kennedy half-dollars on the soles of my feet. Thanks to the cold sea water, adrenaline pumped into me during the fall, and the long walk home, I was stone cold sober when I got to the front door; thus, I managed to sneak to my room, avoiding embarrassing parental inquiries.

When I saw my friends at school the next day, they all swore they’d been completely unaware that I was missing.

fade to blue

While nominally attending high school, my wiseacre friends and I spent much of our time hanging out in an area known as “the Pit,” which was located under the western side of the concrete stands of the football stadium. The Pit had restrooms that were kept locked except for game days and a windowless utility/storage room where the groundskeeper, whom we all called “Jack T. Gardener,” kept his equipment. Jack was pretty cool. He would unlock the restroom when we had a quorum and didn’t report us when we smoked cigarettes or drank beer there. He even kept some softball equipment for the impromptu games we held in the early afternoons when we were buzzed and mellow. In exchange, we kept the Pit cleaned up and carried our empties off campus so he wouldn’t get into trouble when the boys’ dean, who shared a last name with Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, came snooping around.

My best friend, Ed Chung, was part of this group. One day while the two of us were wandering stoned and happy down Clement Street, we found a box of plastic sunglasses in the trash outside the now long gone Owl Drugstore. Their frames were of various styles but all of the same rather unattractive shade of blue (probably why they were being thrown out). We took them over to the Old Man Shack where seniors played checkers and smoked themselves to their graves in Mountain Lake Park and sorted them out. In the process, I discovered I could wear two pairs at once, with the second pair resting atop the first so I looked like I had four eyes. Ed tried on two pair as well, and we both laughed till our sides ached. Then Ed thought up a stunt we could pull, which he organized and we carried out that very evening.

Around 8:00pm, Ed, his older brother, Ray, our friend Chris, and I all met at a tennis court off 25th Avenue and smoked a joint. We then walked out to four bus stops westbound along the 1 California Electric Line and spaced ourselves one stop apart, between 25th and 32nd Avenues, where the line turns south at Lincoln Park to loop back towards downtown. Each of us was wearing two pairs of blue framed sunglasses, one pair atop the other. The bus, with only a few passengers, stopped for each of us. We got on, paid our fares, and seated ourselves from front to rear. When the bus arrived at the 33rd Avenue turn-around, we all got off. The driver didn’t say a word, but he definitely gave us the fish eye.

We managed to get through this stunt without cracking up on the bus. Afterward, we headed to Eagle Point to smoke more dope.

ice sledding in San Francisco

There used to be an ice vending machine at a Union 76 service station located on Geary Boulevard at Stanyan Street. For, as I recall, a dollar you could get either large bags of crushed ice or solid 12×12 ice blocks.

The doors through which the ice was dispensed were large enough for a slender teenager to crawl through. So we’d climb in and steal blocks of ice and then haul them the six blocks over to the Presidio Golf Course via Arguello. Along the way, we’d scrounge copies of the throw-away newspaper The San Francisco Progress which typically accumulated unread on front porches and in the vestibules of flats and apartment buildings.

The Presidio Golf Course had a hill to the west, just past the clubhouse near the Arguello Street Gate, that sloped steeply and dramatically down towards Mountain Lake Park. We’d take the ice blocks up to the crest of the green, put the pilfered newspapers on top of them, and then ride them down the manicured hill—typically stoned out of our minds.

When pursued by the MPs, which was frequently, we’d escape by crossing a deep, concrete culvert that ran parallel to the hill and was choked with blackberry bushes. After crawling under a chain-link fence and scarpering for the nearby park exit at 6th Avenue, we escaped onto Lake Street, scratched and bleeding, but free. We never once got caught.

Posted in Guest Posts, Memoir, Unpublished 'til Now, Writing and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
27 Nov 2012
5 Comments

Cloud Atlas (the book/my rant)

Cover of "Cloud Atlas"

Cover of Cloud Atlas

The talk I’d been hearing about Cloud Atlas from the time of its publication in 2004 was that it was both brilliant and a difficult read. So although I purchased the book in January, I left it parked on my bedside table for several months. I wasn’t tempted to begin reading it until I learned the Wachowskis (formerly the Wachowski brothers) had made a movie of it. Both a story in The New Yorker about the making of the movie and a long trailer for it on YouTube heightened the intrigue. Thus I finally undertook to read the 509 page tome. Since I was under the assumption the book would be hard to get into, I was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t the case at all.

I should state up front that I tend to read at face value—especially the first time around—rather than with the intention of fitting all the pieces of a puzzle together. So if I’m reading a mystery and can figure out whodunit before the author reveals it, I consider the story to have been poorly plotted. In the case of Cloud Atlas, I noted the links between the characters living in different time periods and tolerated the abrupt passages from one section to another, even when they came mid-sentence. But I wasn’t trying to work out the meaning of it all.

This was my first introduction to David Mitchell, and I initially felt that he did an outstanding job writing in multiple genres and holding my interest with each new storyline. At least that was my impression when I posted my movie review of The Words, wherein I made a brief, favorable reference to Cloud Atlas. That was before I reached page 239, which begins the section titled “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”—an entire 70 pages written in dialect!

I’ve taken a number of writing classes and workshops and have read dozens of books on fiction writing. It’s pretty well ingrained in my brain that the guidelines for using dialect in a novel can be summed up thusly: don’t do it! The reason to avoid dialect is quite simple. Dialect makes it hard on your readers. It slows them down. It takes them out of the story.

As a writer, why would you want to do that? Don’t you want your readers to maintain their suspension of disbelief? Don’t you want them to be so engrossed they can’t put the book down, even if it is 509 pages long? If you’re David Mitchell writing Cloud Atlas, you’re already a little on the ropes with your readers with your Russian doll story architecture. So why would you also force them to slog through 70 unrelenting pages of dialect smack in the middle of the book?

Had I not been committed to seeing the movie to find out how the directors dealt with the multiple time periods, I would have given up on the book after the first 10 pages of “Sloosha’s Crossin.’” As it was, I kept thumbing through the section to find out how many more pages there were. I even skipped paragraphs and whole pages here and there, mumbling dark thoughts about the author’s self-indulgence. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

I finished the book, but my annoyance over those 70 pages turned me off to the point where I could no longer suspend disbelief enough to get back into the other stories. When I got to the end, I did not have any epiphanies—and probably wouldn’t have under the best of circumstances, given the conclusion—I just slapped the book closed, relieved that I had made it through.

My next thought was that I really need to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude.

By the time I went to see Cloud Atlas, the movie, it was with the same trepidation with which I’d begun reading the novel. However, that experience was much more satisfying. Tune in next time for my totally rant-free take on the movie.

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