About Me
- Jonathan Tuttle
- FOLIO is a magazine of strange, comic, and strangely comic words and pictures published from 2006 to 2009. For back issues please contact the_folio@hotmail.com.
Issue No. 9, Strangers - The True Story of Rumplestilskin or The False History of Spain
by C. Reilly
History, like a prolonged game of Telephone between people with various types of speech defects, has a tendency to screw things up. Truth be told (though it very seldom is, and in this case, probably shouldn’t be) the Aztec, Incan and Mayan empires started out as one big bluff.
Right about the turn of the 16th century, the word “Aztec” was pronounced something like “Ashhtkkkk” and stood for the particularly venomous noise given off by household cooks in Madrid upon discovering that the bread had molded again, despite their most fervent attempts to scrape off the largest blue-green lumps the day before. “Inca” (Nnnka!) and “Maya” (Moiiiahhhh!), were similar varieties of onomonatpoeic explicative. And they never would have made it into the high realm of the Proper Noun, without the little-noted birth of what should have been Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV, one cold December, right around, oh, 1502.
Rompeño was born both prematurely, and, as his mother worked in the kitchen, onto a bed of lettuce––which resulted in his almost being mistaken for a bit of liver paté by one of the aforementioned cooks. And, perhaps because of this extraordinary beginning or because of the royal blood that ran in his veins, or because medieval Spanish kitchens contained such an odd mixture of miasmas, it was soon apparent that he possessed the equally extraordinary ability to make all self-aggrandizing lies come true. When his mother announced, “Madonna! I’ve just had a baby!” and someone else rudely yelled, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Spain!” poof, she was. (Incidentally, the long genealogical tree of Isabella is another product of exaggerations made true by this strange brand of magic.)
Other inexplicable wonders followed: while trying to explain who the boy’s father was, Rompeño’s mother developed a birthmark that looked exactly like the crest of the Stephano-Carrero household, and 2 acres of land, which hadn’t initially belonged to her, but were, in any case, roughly as fertile as a Castilian nun, started spitting out tobacco by the pipe-full. The poor woman could think of nothing to do but consult a local doctor. So, with Rompeño in tow, she explained what had happened, and the doctor prescribed some particularly strong medicinal herbs for delusion. But Rompeño’s mother insisted on the truth of her story (even going so far as to jab one long finger smelling strongly of cabbage into the physician’s robes), and demanded that the doctor brag about something completely impossible and see if it didn’t just happen. The doctor scratched his bed-bug-bitten chin, chuckled, and declared in a sardonic voice, “My daughter can spin straw into gold.” He didn’t think any more of it, and went home early that day with a slight headache and the sincere hope that cabbage soup wasn’t on the dinner menu.
But, as we already know, nothing remained the same for the doctor after he came home – he was fabulously wealthy, from all the straw his daughter had just up and decided to try and spin with. Like a good medieval man, he carted her off to Madrid’s city center, explained her gift, and tried to pawn her off on the somewhat financially-challenged royals. A demonstration was duly given, and immediately afterward, a secret wedding.
However, as obsequiously mentioned by one of the high advisors, how was this sudden massive influx of gold to be accounted for? There would be no reason to maintain taxes if it could be suddenly proved that the kingdom was generating a veritable surplus of revenue. And if there weren’t any taxes... well, they might well slip into republican government, or something equally heinous and 300 years too modern. A committee was formed to assess the problem, and after three weeks of very serious thinking, someone suggested that they simply claim to have found some new land, excessively far away (yes!...across the ocean, even!), hand-select a few well-known explorers and throw them temporarily in prison, and announce the unexpected discovery of a group of massively wealthy primitive people who just happened (though appropriately so) to regard the Spaniards as the long-awaited reincarnations of their deities. The royals loved it, the explorers were tossed behind bars (with the provision that they would be let out after telling some ludicrous story about the world being round), and the doctor’s daughter started spinning.
The wanderings of Rompeño’s mother and her magical son eventually brought them back to the doctor’s now-sprawling castle. She immediately realized what had happened, considered it proof that her original assumptions had been correct, and decided to pay the good doctor a personal visit for a little well-deserved “I told you so.” Upon learning where the daughter was, and feeling slightly guilty that she had more or less doomed the girl to a career as a state worker, she proceeded to the city center to see the royals. Though initially rebuffed, the highest High Advisor eventually got wind of a crazy wench with a brag-sanctifying baby hanging around the gates, put two and two together and called an emergency committee meeting. The “wench” was brought into an inner chamber.
While she waited to help that little dear condemned to spinning, an under secretary who found her to have recovered from her pregnancy remarkably well, blabbed the story of the newly discovered empire. He had heard it, he claimed directly from the High Advisor himself, and he’d be damned if the whole thing wasn’t completely true. Rompeño gave a little squeal, and 3,000 miles away from the Stephano-Carrero household’s unrecognized child, the tectonic plates rearranged themselves, a fully formed and populated continent burst out of the ocean, and the imagined-into-flesh natives shook water from their headdresses, and wiped off their spears.
The imprisoned explorers immediately found themselves onboard ships they never remembered setting out in, but in which they now happily stood in gold up to their knees. The letters they had-not-actually-but-now-had written materialized on the broad committee table with a slight popping and sucking noise, and the committee members, forgetting proper language in their total astonishment, uttered “Nnnka! Moiiiahhhh!! Ashhtkkkk!!!” like common cooks. Their cries passed from the inner inner chamber, to Rompeño in the outer inner chamber, and settled lightly upon his ears. Young as he was, and not fully in control of his powers, he allowed these familiar explicatives, which had so often passed into the womb, to adhere to the tribes of the “new” empire.
Yet, forced to acknowledge that the fictional ships and imagined empires were no longer lies, and that the (only slightly) more kosher riches were on their way, the committee was faced with a serious problem. The whole bit could be undone at the squeal of a baby. Accordingly, the High Advisor slipped from the inner inner chamber, and, pretending to address the matter of the confined doctor’s daughter, bashed mother, child, and secretary soundly on the head with copies of the codified laws, and buried them in a common grave outside the city.
In order to avoid further unpleasant questioning, it was decided that the whole tale would be foisted off on the Germans, Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV’s name changed, and copies of the story circulated by secret Spanish agents among the German press. Incidentally, the phrase ‘to spin a tale’ comes from a printer in Heidelberg who ran low on ink, and couldn’t be bothered with explanations about straw.
The supremely Catholic advisors of the royals could not, however, resist including a moral twist in their fabricately fabricated story. Accordingly, the little tale they circulated (entitled Rumplestilskin, after the Germanized Rompeño) ended with a trick about discovering a true name and being forced to give up one’s first child. While they intended this as a subtle warning to over-curious etymologists, the death of Rompeño had left a lingering curse on the court, and their plan backfired. Having bumped off Rompeño with some old laws, they naturally could no longer rely on their own bragging to sustain the empire (that is, Spain’s first child), which ultimately fractured, beneath the burden of Spanish law, into the much-feared independent republics. Whether the untimely bludgeoning of the empire by a scroll of antiquated, old-world codifications bears any resemblance to the mode of Rompeño’s death, can, of course, only be left to wild speculation.
History, like a prolonged game of Telephone between people with various types of speech defects, has a tendency to screw things up. Truth be told (though it very seldom is, and in this case, probably shouldn’t be) the Aztec, Incan and Mayan empires started out as one big bluff.
Right about the turn of the 16th century, the word “Aztec” was pronounced something like “Ashhtkkkk” and stood for the particularly venomous noise given off by household cooks in Madrid upon discovering that the bread had molded again, despite their most fervent attempts to scrape off the largest blue-green lumps the day before. “Inca” (Nnnka!) and “Maya” (Moiiiahhhh!), were similar varieties of onomonatpoeic explicative. And they never would have made it into the high realm of the Proper Noun, without the little-noted birth of what should have been Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV, one cold December, right around, oh, 1502.
Rompeño was born both prematurely, and, as his mother worked in the kitchen, onto a bed of lettuce––which resulted in his almost being mistaken for a bit of liver paté by one of the aforementioned cooks. And, perhaps because of this extraordinary beginning or because of the royal blood that ran in his veins, or because medieval Spanish kitchens contained such an odd mixture of miasmas, it was soon apparent that he possessed the equally extraordinary ability to make all self-aggrandizing lies come true. When his mother announced, “Madonna! I’ve just had a baby!” and someone else rudely yelled, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Spain!” poof, she was. (Incidentally, the long genealogical tree of Isabella is another product of exaggerations made true by this strange brand of magic.)
Other inexplicable wonders followed: while trying to explain who the boy’s father was, Rompeño’s mother developed a birthmark that looked exactly like the crest of the Stephano-Carrero household, and 2 acres of land, which hadn’t initially belonged to her, but were, in any case, roughly as fertile as a Castilian nun, started spitting out tobacco by the pipe-full. The poor woman could think of nothing to do but consult a local doctor. So, with Rompeño in tow, she explained what had happened, and the doctor prescribed some particularly strong medicinal herbs for delusion. But Rompeño’s mother insisted on the truth of her story (even going so far as to jab one long finger smelling strongly of cabbage into the physician’s robes), and demanded that the doctor brag about something completely impossible and see if it didn’t just happen. The doctor scratched his bed-bug-bitten chin, chuckled, and declared in a sardonic voice, “My daughter can spin straw into gold.” He didn’t think any more of it, and went home early that day with a slight headache and the sincere hope that cabbage soup wasn’t on the dinner menu.
But, as we already know, nothing remained the same for the doctor after he came home – he was fabulously wealthy, from all the straw his daughter had just up and decided to try and spin with. Like a good medieval man, he carted her off to Madrid’s city center, explained her gift, and tried to pawn her off on the somewhat financially-challenged royals. A demonstration was duly given, and immediately afterward, a secret wedding.
However, as obsequiously mentioned by one of the high advisors, how was this sudden massive influx of gold to be accounted for? There would be no reason to maintain taxes if it could be suddenly proved that the kingdom was generating a veritable surplus of revenue. And if there weren’t any taxes... well, they might well slip into republican government, or something equally heinous and 300 years too modern. A committee was formed to assess the problem, and after three weeks of very serious thinking, someone suggested that they simply claim to have found some new land, excessively far away (yes!...across the ocean, even!), hand-select a few well-known explorers and throw them temporarily in prison, and announce the unexpected discovery of a group of massively wealthy primitive people who just happened (though appropriately so) to regard the Spaniards as the long-awaited reincarnations of their deities. The royals loved it, the explorers were tossed behind bars (with the provision that they would be let out after telling some ludicrous story about the world being round), and the doctor’s daughter started spinning.
The wanderings of Rompeño’s mother and her magical son eventually brought them back to the doctor’s now-sprawling castle. She immediately realized what had happened, considered it proof that her original assumptions had been correct, and decided to pay the good doctor a personal visit for a little well-deserved “I told you so.” Upon learning where the daughter was, and feeling slightly guilty that she had more or less doomed the girl to a career as a state worker, she proceeded to the city center to see the royals. Though initially rebuffed, the highest High Advisor eventually got wind of a crazy wench with a brag-sanctifying baby hanging around the gates, put two and two together and called an emergency committee meeting. The “wench” was brought into an inner chamber.
While she waited to help that little dear condemned to spinning, an under secretary who found her to have recovered from her pregnancy remarkably well, blabbed the story of the newly discovered empire. He had heard it, he claimed directly from the High Advisor himself, and he’d be damned if the whole thing wasn’t completely true. Rompeño gave a little squeal, and 3,000 miles away from the Stephano-Carrero household’s unrecognized child, the tectonic plates rearranged themselves, a fully formed and populated continent burst out of the ocean, and the imagined-into-flesh natives shook water from their headdresses, and wiped off their spears.
The imprisoned explorers immediately found themselves onboard ships they never remembered setting out in, but in which they now happily stood in gold up to their knees. The letters they had-not-actually-but-now-had written materialized on the broad committee table with a slight popping and sucking noise, and the committee members, forgetting proper language in their total astonishment, uttered “Nnnka! Moiiiahhhh!! Ashhtkkkk!!!” like common cooks. Their cries passed from the inner inner chamber, to Rompeño in the outer inner chamber, and settled lightly upon his ears. Young as he was, and not fully in control of his powers, he allowed these familiar explicatives, which had so often passed into the womb, to adhere to the tribes of the “new” empire.
Yet, forced to acknowledge that the fictional ships and imagined empires were no longer lies, and that the (only slightly) more kosher riches were on their way, the committee was faced with a serious problem. The whole bit could be undone at the squeal of a baby. Accordingly, the High Advisor slipped from the inner inner chamber, and, pretending to address the matter of the confined doctor’s daughter, bashed mother, child, and secretary soundly on the head with copies of the codified laws, and buried them in a common grave outside the city.
In order to avoid further unpleasant questioning, it was decided that the whole tale would be foisted off on the Germans, Rompeño de San Stephano-Carrero IV’s name changed, and copies of the story circulated by secret Spanish agents among the German press. Incidentally, the phrase ‘to spin a tale’ comes from a printer in Heidelberg who ran low on ink, and couldn’t be bothered with explanations about straw.
The supremely Catholic advisors of the royals could not, however, resist including a moral twist in their fabricately fabricated story. Accordingly, the little tale they circulated (entitled Rumplestilskin, after the Germanized Rompeño) ended with a trick about discovering a true name and being forced to give up one’s first child. While they intended this as a subtle warning to over-curious etymologists, the death of Rompeño had left a lingering curse on the court, and their plan backfired. Having bumped off Rompeño with some old laws, they naturally could no longer rely on their own bragging to sustain the empire (that is, Spain’s first child), which ultimately fractured, beneath the burden of Spanish law, into the much-feared independent republics. Whether the untimely bludgeoning of the empire by a scroll of antiquated, old-world codifications bears any resemblance to the mode of Rompeño’s death, can, of course, only be left to wild speculation.
Issue No. 9, Strangers - Fragments
In the café, a woman approached a young man writing. “That is so rude,” she said. “You might as well be talking on the phone.”
Unfortunately, I took my daughter to the pier. I stood at the end admiring the view and she did the same, tucked into a ball at my feet. It might have been an itch on her back, or a strong wind, but she rolled to windward and off the pier, dropping that thirty-foot drop, down to where the Mexicans trawled their fish heads. I saw the little splash and the last little bubble. I thought about jumping in after her but quicker thoughts came after – all the way down? in my clothes? is it cold? I couldn’t call anyone because my cell phone was at home and I didn’t want to raise a ruckus with the fishermen. In a panic, I just walked back to the shore, thinking that, maybe, if I just breathed deep and walked steady, the problem would solve itself, like the problem in a clogged toilet that loosens over time.
The boy at the desk beside me pulled a handful of dry pasta from his pocket. He put one spiraled noodle into his mouth and pulled his cheeks into his tongue. A few minutes later he spat it out. It was bigger, rounder. He put it between his teeth and bit it in two. “I get angry,” he said.
I left my life and set out on the road, looking not for the circus, but for a roving band of Jesuit teachers.
The substitue teacher had a photographic memory, onerous when storing the images of small butts pushed up against the windows of passing cars, but handy for remembering license plate numbers.
Round little Sean was picked up for exhibitionism and the poor substitute teacher missed early morning classes, tossing and turning all night from elementary school butt.
Two library books belonging up north were taken and lost on a vacation down south. The signs that tied them to their city, the stamps on each side, the return date, the barcode, were meaningless on the floor of Winn Dixie.
Security laughs at me, but from my post at Crabtree and Evelyn I can see a young man walk back and forth across the garden footbridge in the center of the mall. Every day he comes and with the same distracted, faraway look in his eyes. He paces, stops, and stares down over the railing.
The secret shopper was surprised, surprised and touched, to see a sales clerk so polite. The shopper was hired from an independent firm to weed out the ineffectual workers, those who have the time to lean and use it. But this clerk, oh this dimple of a clerk, he could do no wrong. No machine installed to replace him could be faster, stronger. And the clerk, after all, could smile, a smile that hooked the customer, closed the deal, and warmed the cooler patches of soul left in the poor, retailed sucker. “Let me buy you a drink,” the secret shopper said to the clerk. “I cannot drink on duty,” of course he said. The shopper laughed. “After your shift, son, please, I would never.”
Once, interred at the City Recycling Center, I was to remove from the plastic bottles all the wrappers unwrapped and stuffed inside. Removing them without breaking the bottle in a frustrated fit was a delicate job involving tweezers. The only way I could do it and still retain my sanity was to think that instead of taking the wrappers out I was putting a miniature sailboat in.
The tourist saw a Buddhist monk and shook her head. “That’s no way to live a life,” she told her husband.
Issue No. 9, Strangers - Credits
Fiction: C. Reilly
Fragments: Jonathan Tuttle
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Drawing: Ben Tuttle
Fragments: Jonathan Tuttle
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Drawing: Ben Tuttle
Issue No. 8, Libraries - Maldestiny and the Library
Miraculously the young man woke an hour before work. He sat on the porch and looked at the street. The porch, he thought, is a stage where the actor can watch the audience. Knowing him, I’m probably right in thinking he ran upstairs after having that thought and scribbled it down into an old school notebook. He used to be an actor; that is, he used to act; that is, once upon a time he and his little friends dressed up in strange clothes to amuse adults. Now, he worked in a library.
He had the feeling sometimes of being behind a curtain when he left his house for work. The old, reliable butterflies spread out in his chest and called excitedly to his mind that this was it again. The mind, however, knew all too well where it was dragging the chest. This miraculous morning he arrived early enough to enter through the back as his employers wanted, not “with the public,” who were grouped outside the sliding front doors imagining the porn sites they were about to explore.
Who had the idea to let people into the library? thought the young man. The library itself is a fantastic idea, every town should have one, but the doors to the library…. It’s not as if people should be barred all together. Someone let the books in and the books were written by people and bound by people and given the very best qualities of those people. The books are sifts leaving all snot, shit, and tears outside…on the curb…where they belong.
Unfortunately the sliding doors did slide apart and all flesh and fluid rushed at the young man, none of it interested in books. They needed internet passes and directions to DVDs and had to use the telephone and had to take a piss. Luckily the young man was getting older, had just received a degree of higher education even, and found it easier with each passing day--not to smile--but to at least curt and tart his lips into a pinch when faced with the shitty sacks. His eyes, on the other hand, were not maturing fast enough. He could tell his eyes were betraying his thoughts. “Have a great day,” he would say, and the patrons’ mouths fell in horror at the disrespect.
Funny, to his co-workers, he was all rings and posy. They often told him how pleasant he was, how responsible, what lovely eyes he had, but probably only because he asked them lots of questions, and that they truly adored. “Did you grow up here?” “How are your kids?” “Are you feeling OK?” The attention shone bright in their eyes, like footlights blacking out the audience. They couldn’t ask him questions, they couldn’t see him.
His boss’s name was Happy. She was a middle-aged woman with long, disparate hair, floral stretch pants, and a penchant for trash. Shy and mature most of time, she occasionally let out a lighter, or darker, side. “Did you see the news? I’m letting everyone know. Anna Nicole Smith died today,” she said, mournfully; as well as, “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Jesse Bradford. He was a shelver here when he was a teenager. He’s in that movie Swimfan. I love that movie.”
The mayor recently awarded Jesse Bradford a READ poster: the actor’s headshot beneath the word “READ” and with the quote, “I read scripts for a living.” His chest hair hangs out of his bathrobe. The young man stood beneath the poster, burning off violent energy by assuring a drooling woman in a wheelchair she owed the library fifty-five dollars. When he got sick of it, he nodded to the security guard, a dim, aggressive man who quickly came over and wheeled the woman out the doors. Her chair came to rest in the middle of the street.
“Could you please announce that this car has its lights on?” Happy was standing behind the young man. How long was she standing behind me? She gave him a scrap of paper with a few neatly written letters and numbers and gestured to the nearly antique PA system in the back. “I’ve never done any announcements,” he said. “It’s easy, just flip the switch,” said Happy. But the young man knew it wasn’t easy. The announcements were always being mangled with nervous stutters and dropped phrases. He watched the higher-ups argue over who would have to do it, each competing to be the shyest librarian.
The young man found the switches necessary, stooped over the microphone, and gave the announcement. He thought for sure he was being punished for his less-than-chipper tone with the invalid and, returning to the circ desk, told himself sarcastically how lucky he was to have a job where he could try so many different things. Frank of Reference swung by the desk. “A tip,” he said. “When I do the closing announcements, I always shush into the mic first, so I can hear myself out there, make sure it’s working,” and then in a whisper, “Shhh. Like that.”
The young man did not wake an hour before work the next morning. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place in the river twice. He jumped into the car, forsaking contacts for glasses. This will let them see another side of me, he thought, my Clark Kent. I’ll look so different, they’ll have to ask me who I am, where I came from, what I did in high school. “Sorry I’m late, Happy. The traffic––” “Could you make the opening announcement?” interrupted Happy.
“Opening announcement? I thought we just make closing announcements.” “New policy,” said Happy. “But we already opened. I accidentally walked in with the public.” “And please announce our summer schedule of programs.” “The whole schedule?” “Read all the dates, times, and locations. Out loud, please.” Happy pointed again to the microphone, then slid past to the secret, back staircase that lead to the book bindery. Sure enough, the young man found, stuck to the PA, an old card-catalogue card bearing the tiny words he was to announce. “Shhh. The library is now open,” he said, a perfect two inches from the stand, clearly and without spit. “If you would like to check out items but need a library card, please go to the circulation desk. If you would like to use the internet but do not have a password, please…” etc.
Surely, surely he was being punished. Reading every storytime, book discussion, and ESL session? The glasses must have failed to disguise the invective in his pupils since his co-workers had not asked him a thing about his past, just banished him to the back where he could be heard but not seen, heard but not see, where his Medusa eyes could not browbeat any patrons into stone. I want to work on Sundays, he misanthought, when the library is closed. I’ll wake up early for that. Put on a suit and tie. Force my way in and stand at the desk, ready for work, as still and upright as the books.
One woman, besieged on all sides by her legions of small children, waited, hands and feet tapping at the desk, for the young man to return. “Can I help you?” he said. “Where is everyone?” The young man looked around. Indeed, all clerks, assistants, and directors were absent. He glanced back to the usual computer multitudes and even they looked a little thin. “Is there something I could do for you?” he faltered. The woman spat. “I don’t owe you a dime!”
Next morning, Happy handed a copy of Poe’s collected to the young man. “You’ll find a story dog-eared,” she said. “We’re trying to get people in the mood.” “In the mood for what?” asked the young man. “Reading, checking out books.” “You’d like me to announce it?” “Of course.” She went to the stairs, leaving the young man alone with the Poe and the microphone.
“Misery is manifold,” he began. It felt a little silly, flicking the switch for a half hour of recitation, but, after all, this is what he trained for. Somewhere in the middle he even got a bit into it, lending occasional scary voices and gracefully magesticulating with his free arm. In the corner of his eye, he saw a huddled family rush out of the library while he was reading. A line of patrons shrank one by one behind the desk. The posse of computer crazies was slithering out of the library and they did not linger by the flagpole. It gave strength to the young man’s voice and he read to the end. The remainder of the day was relatively quiet, as if it were raining.
A Divine Comedy sat on the young man’s keyboard when he next came in for work. A post-it note on the first page read, “Begin here. There’s water by the microphone. Happy.” He looked to the front doors. The unsanitary napkins and soiled fingernails were already seeping through. He took the book and went to the back. Flipping through the pages before flipping the switch, he thought: It’s gonna be a long day. But it wasn’t. Purgatory was finished up after lunch and by paradise it was time to go home.
The young man put the book back on Happy’s desk, realizing he hadn’t seen her but for the second in the morning when she rushed down the stairs. Closing announcements should be made pretty soon, he thought. “Everyone must exit the library immediately,” that sort of thing. But upon reaching the front desk and looking around at the stacks, he saw there was no reason for that announcement. No one was browsing, no one was masturbating. There wasn’t anyone there.
The books looked glad, I remember him thinking, like they were enjoying each other’s company. He wound his way through them as if he were winding his way through an art museum, pace slow, hands respectfully clasped behind him. He spotted a handsome John Donne volume but did not dare pick it up. After all, the books were not meant to be used, just to sit touching side by side in exactly the right order, forever. So this is what Sunday looks like, he said. It should be all days.
* * *
I hung my vestments as usual after a well-attended midsummer service and plugged in a hot pot for tea. I always run up to my office after a service. I do not mean to be anti-social, certainly I have become anything but in these later years. My smile, I’ve heard, is an actual smile and my eyes block any mischievous thoughts, though for the most part they no longer see people as undesirable sacks of desire anyway. I eventually go down to the undercroft for coffee-hour, but the minutes after the service are my minutes and I take them in my dressing room of sorts, taking off my make-up of sorts.
I jotted a few notes for myself in an old school notebook––“Visit Mrs. Palmer,” “Speech to the board”––and sat back. A knock came at the door.
“Come in,” I called, half-expecting a tipped-over coffee pot that needed attention.
The door crept open and Happy stood in the frame, hair more disparate, pants more tasteless.
“Good morning, Happy,” I said, “Come in.”
“Reverend, I slept late,” she said flatly, remaining at the door. “A boy put fireworks in the drop box and it took all night to clean it up. I apologize.”
“That’s all right, come in, come in.”
Happy sat in the chair in front of my desk. Her jittering knee rattled the pills in her purse. “I missed your sermon,” she said.
“Well, you can expect hell for that.”
She did not laugh. She had no patience for the kind of humor that goes over so well with everyone else. “Could you read me your sermon?” she asked.
“Read it? I can give you a copy if you like.”
“Read it out loud.”
I checked my watch. “Well...” Having handed my hard copy to the editor of the newsletter just a few minutes prior, I had to find the file on my computer. “Tell me again, you just…want me to…read it?”
She nodded. I cleared my throat. Her knee slowly came to rest. “What patience He had for his followers is a miracle worth awe, but what patience those young men had for Him should also give pause. Though suffering graciously was mostly His job, they at least could suffer a fool and there were so many times He must have looked”–– etc.
I glanced up at Happy once or twice in the beginning, then with increasing frequency towards the end. She had me feeling immensely flattered, and not because she asked me to read––she had done that many times a long time ago––but because she sat there while I read and allowed me to glance up at her.
“Thank you,” she said, after I had finished, and got up.
“Wait,” I said, rising with her. The flattery made me ask. “Can I ask you—”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you where you went all those times you asked me to announce things?”
“I went downstairs.”
“Yes, I saw that, but why did—”
“The better to hear you.”
“To hear me?”
“There’s a speaker downstairs. I put a sofa in front of it.”
“Oh…”
“I had to put lots of sofas in front of it actually. We all went downstairs to listen to you. You have a very natural speaking voice. It lulled us to sleep, no offense. We spent all day sleeping down there. Resting on each others’ tummies.”
I laughed.
“You make a better minister than a circulation clerk,” she said. “Your eyes were never quite as insulting as ours.”
Happy left; she had taped all of that week’s local news shows and had plans to curl up with a bowl of popcorn and a police chase. I decided to stay in the office, the coffee-hourglass being on its last few grains anyway. There were parts of the sermon that came off as quite foul when I read them to Happy––I wanted to make a few adjustments and get a new copy to the newsletter. I refilled the hot pot and called the family. I rolled up my sleeves for another day of rest.
He had the feeling sometimes of being behind a curtain when he left his house for work. The old, reliable butterflies spread out in his chest and called excitedly to his mind that this was it again. The mind, however, knew all too well where it was dragging the chest. This miraculous morning he arrived early enough to enter through the back as his employers wanted, not “with the public,” who were grouped outside the sliding front doors imagining the porn sites they were about to explore.
Who had the idea to let people into the library? thought the young man. The library itself is a fantastic idea, every town should have one, but the doors to the library…. It’s not as if people should be barred all together. Someone let the books in and the books were written by people and bound by people and given the very best qualities of those people. The books are sifts leaving all snot, shit, and tears outside…on the curb…where they belong.
Unfortunately the sliding doors did slide apart and all flesh and fluid rushed at the young man, none of it interested in books. They needed internet passes and directions to DVDs and had to use the telephone and had to take a piss. Luckily the young man was getting older, had just received a degree of higher education even, and found it easier with each passing day--not to smile--but to at least curt and tart his lips into a pinch when faced with the shitty sacks. His eyes, on the other hand, were not maturing fast enough. He could tell his eyes were betraying his thoughts. “Have a great day,” he would say, and the patrons’ mouths fell in horror at the disrespect.
Funny, to his co-workers, he was all rings and posy. They often told him how pleasant he was, how responsible, what lovely eyes he had, but probably only because he asked them lots of questions, and that they truly adored. “Did you grow up here?” “How are your kids?” “Are you feeling OK?” The attention shone bright in their eyes, like footlights blacking out the audience. They couldn’t ask him questions, they couldn’t see him.
His boss’s name was Happy. She was a middle-aged woman with long, disparate hair, floral stretch pants, and a penchant for trash. Shy and mature most of time, she occasionally let out a lighter, or darker, side. “Did you see the news? I’m letting everyone know. Anna Nicole Smith died today,” she said, mournfully; as well as, “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Jesse Bradford. He was a shelver here when he was a teenager. He’s in that movie Swimfan. I love that movie.”
The mayor recently awarded Jesse Bradford a READ poster: the actor’s headshot beneath the word “READ” and with the quote, “I read scripts for a living.” His chest hair hangs out of his bathrobe. The young man stood beneath the poster, burning off violent energy by assuring a drooling woman in a wheelchair she owed the library fifty-five dollars. When he got sick of it, he nodded to the security guard, a dim, aggressive man who quickly came over and wheeled the woman out the doors. Her chair came to rest in the middle of the street.
“Could you please announce that this car has its lights on?” Happy was standing behind the young man. How long was she standing behind me? She gave him a scrap of paper with a few neatly written letters and numbers and gestured to the nearly antique PA system in the back. “I’ve never done any announcements,” he said. “It’s easy, just flip the switch,” said Happy. But the young man knew it wasn’t easy. The announcements were always being mangled with nervous stutters and dropped phrases. He watched the higher-ups argue over who would have to do it, each competing to be the shyest librarian.
The young man found the switches necessary, stooped over the microphone, and gave the announcement. He thought for sure he was being punished for his less-than-chipper tone with the invalid and, returning to the circ desk, told himself sarcastically how lucky he was to have a job where he could try so many different things. Frank of Reference swung by the desk. “A tip,” he said. “When I do the closing announcements, I always shush into the mic first, so I can hear myself out there, make sure it’s working,” and then in a whisper, “Shhh. Like that.”
The young man did not wake an hour before work the next morning. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place in the river twice. He jumped into the car, forsaking contacts for glasses. This will let them see another side of me, he thought, my Clark Kent. I’ll look so different, they’ll have to ask me who I am, where I came from, what I did in high school. “Sorry I’m late, Happy. The traffic––” “Could you make the opening announcement?” interrupted Happy.
“Opening announcement? I thought we just make closing announcements.” “New policy,” said Happy. “But we already opened. I accidentally walked in with the public.” “And please announce our summer schedule of programs.” “The whole schedule?” “Read all the dates, times, and locations. Out loud, please.” Happy pointed again to the microphone, then slid past to the secret, back staircase that lead to the book bindery. Sure enough, the young man found, stuck to the PA, an old card-catalogue card bearing the tiny words he was to announce. “Shhh. The library is now open,” he said, a perfect two inches from the stand, clearly and without spit. “If you would like to check out items but need a library card, please go to the circulation desk. If you would like to use the internet but do not have a password, please…” etc.
Surely, surely he was being punished. Reading every storytime, book discussion, and ESL session? The glasses must have failed to disguise the invective in his pupils since his co-workers had not asked him a thing about his past, just banished him to the back where he could be heard but not seen, heard but not see, where his Medusa eyes could not browbeat any patrons into stone. I want to work on Sundays, he misanthought, when the library is closed. I’ll wake up early for that. Put on a suit and tie. Force my way in and stand at the desk, ready for work, as still and upright as the books.
One woman, besieged on all sides by her legions of small children, waited, hands and feet tapping at the desk, for the young man to return. “Can I help you?” he said. “Where is everyone?” The young man looked around. Indeed, all clerks, assistants, and directors were absent. He glanced back to the usual computer multitudes and even they looked a little thin. “Is there something I could do for you?” he faltered. The woman spat. “I don’t owe you a dime!”
Next morning, Happy handed a copy of Poe’s collected to the young man. “You’ll find a story dog-eared,” she said. “We’re trying to get people in the mood.” “In the mood for what?” asked the young man. “Reading, checking out books.” “You’d like me to announce it?” “Of course.” She went to the stairs, leaving the young man alone with the Poe and the microphone.
“Misery is manifold,” he began. It felt a little silly, flicking the switch for a half hour of recitation, but, after all, this is what he trained for. Somewhere in the middle he even got a bit into it, lending occasional scary voices and gracefully magesticulating with his free arm. In the corner of his eye, he saw a huddled family rush out of the library while he was reading. A line of patrons shrank one by one behind the desk. The posse of computer crazies was slithering out of the library and they did not linger by the flagpole. It gave strength to the young man’s voice and he read to the end. The remainder of the day was relatively quiet, as if it were raining.
A Divine Comedy sat on the young man’s keyboard when he next came in for work. A post-it note on the first page read, “Begin here. There’s water by the microphone. Happy.” He looked to the front doors. The unsanitary napkins and soiled fingernails were already seeping through. He took the book and went to the back. Flipping through the pages before flipping the switch, he thought: It’s gonna be a long day. But it wasn’t. Purgatory was finished up after lunch and by paradise it was time to go home.
The young man put the book back on Happy’s desk, realizing he hadn’t seen her but for the second in the morning when she rushed down the stairs. Closing announcements should be made pretty soon, he thought. “Everyone must exit the library immediately,” that sort of thing. But upon reaching the front desk and looking around at the stacks, he saw there was no reason for that announcement. No one was browsing, no one was masturbating. There wasn’t anyone there.
The books looked glad, I remember him thinking, like they were enjoying each other’s company. He wound his way through them as if he were winding his way through an art museum, pace slow, hands respectfully clasped behind him. He spotted a handsome John Donne volume but did not dare pick it up. After all, the books were not meant to be used, just to sit touching side by side in exactly the right order, forever. So this is what Sunday looks like, he said. It should be all days.
* * *
I hung my vestments as usual after a well-attended midsummer service and plugged in a hot pot for tea. I always run up to my office after a service. I do not mean to be anti-social, certainly I have become anything but in these later years. My smile, I’ve heard, is an actual smile and my eyes block any mischievous thoughts, though for the most part they no longer see people as undesirable sacks of desire anyway. I eventually go down to the undercroft for coffee-hour, but the minutes after the service are my minutes and I take them in my dressing room of sorts, taking off my make-up of sorts.
I jotted a few notes for myself in an old school notebook––“Visit Mrs. Palmer,” “Speech to the board”––and sat back. A knock came at the door.
“Come in,” I called, half-expecting a tipped-over coffee pot that needed attention.
The door crept open and Happy stood in the frame, hair more disparate, pants more tasteless.
“Good morning, Happy,” I said, “Come in.”
“Reverend, I slept late,” she said flatly, remaining at the door. “A boy put fireworks in the drop box and it took all night to clean it up. I apologize.”
“That’s all right, come in, come in.”
Happy sat in the chair in front of my desk. Her jittering knee rattled the pills in her purse. “I missed your sermon,” she said.
“Well, you can expect hell for that.”
She did not laugh. She had no patience for the kind of humor that goes over so well with everyone else. “Could you read me your sermon?” she asked.
“Read it? I can give you a copy if you like.”
“Read it out loud.”
I checked my watch. “Well...” Having handed my hard copy to the editor of the newsletter just a few minutes prior, I had to find the file on my computer. “Tell me again, you just…want me to…read it?”
She nodded. I cleared my throat. Her knee slowly came to rest. “What patience He had for his followers is a miracle worth awe, but what patience those young men had for Him should also give pause. Though suffering graciously was mostly His job, they at least could suffer a fool and there were so many times He must have looked”–– etc.
I glanced up at Happy once or twice in the beginning, then with increasing frequency towards the end. She had me feeling immensely flattered, and not because she asked me to read––she had done that many times a long time ago––but because she sat there while I read and allowed me to glance up at her.
“Thank you,” she said, after I had finished, and got up.
“Wait,” I said, rising with her. The flattery made me ask. “Can I ask you—”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you where you went all those times you asked me to announce things?”
“I went downstairs.”
“Yes, I saw that, but why did—”
“The better to hear you.”
“To hear me?”
“There’s a speaker downstairs. I put a sofa in front of it.”
“Oh…”
“I had to put lots of sofas in front of it actually. We all went downstairs to listen to you. You have a very natural speaking voice. It lulled us to sleep, no offense. We spent all day sleeping down there. Resting on each others’ tummies.”
I laughed.
“You make a better minister than a circulation clerk,” she said. “Your eyes were never quite as insulting as ours.”
Happy left; she had taped all of that week’s local news shows and had plans to curl up with a bowl of popcorn and a police chase. I decided to stay in the office, the coffee-hourglass being on its last few grains anyway. There were parts of the sermon that came off as quite foul when I read them to Happy––I wanted to make a few adjustments and get a new copy to the newsletter. I refilled the hot pot and called the family. I rolled up my sleeves for another day of rest.
Issue No. 8, Libraries - Vanity and the Photograph
A child comes of age in the public library when the top of his head is flush with the top of the librarian’s desk; that is to say, flush with the tips of her miserable nipples. The sign on the desk doesn’t put it that way, but words are things closely watched in the library while shapes are generally ignored.One child not yet of age approached the desk of his public library and removed from his inner coat pocket a folded leaf of eight-by-ten Ilford. He placed it on the desk. “Yes?” the librarian said, keeping her hands crossed next to the paper and her eyes stooped towards the child. But he only looked up at her, without expression. She pried the paper apart, whereupon she saw a young girl, a nude, her back to the camera and bent over an older man. He, also nude, knelt below the young girl, each of his fingers encased in a stick of unsalted butter. The librarian opened her mouth and shut up her throat, pushing one small, pitiable breath. She looked back to the child. He was wiggling into his mittens and halfway out the door.
Later that day, the librarian recognized the child as a boy she had eavesdropped on not a week earlier, a boy she then scolded for using the Lord’s name in vain.
Issue No. 8, Libraries - Pleasure Reading
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Cover Star: Eunice Marx
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Drawings, from "Wake": Ben Tuttle
Funded by: Melanie Samson
Cover Star: Eunice Marx
Photography: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Drawings, from "Wake": Ben Tuttle
Funded by: Melanie Samson
Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Closing the Distance (Hermit's Curse)
Wherever I live it’ll be some afflicted mix
of character, some soup of unkown stock...
As of now I hear my unknown neighbors
with CD or DVD at some 90 decibel,
the bass cranked to some amphetamine level...
It’s rarely ever quiet here in the so-called sticks.
This citified forest houses, maybe, 5 or 6 each block
(count the mail-boxes as you drive round
and while you’re at it, snoopy boomer,
take down the numbers on the Realtors’ signs).
Once-muffled traffic has grown louder yearly,
every new owner leveling a tree-towered lot,
selling the boles for pulpwood and burning
the stumps uprooted by the same machination
that fuels this yearning for Victorian lawns.
A level un-grassed plot, smooth as a cemetery,
fresh-raked earth, and within its periphery
a house plunked down, dumb as a tombstone
planted too soon in un-fertile ground––
such slack imagination cannot stifle my yawns...
I’ll be moving on soon, so have at it!
Snoopy boomer! Tear down the trees,
mow down the house, and gravel the drive!
Just as if no-one ever lived here while I was live...
By the way, make the driveway circular––
it’ll be easier for the EMT’s (or the coroner)
to snatch you up after another hard day
of digging up the creeping-charley, oxalis,
stinging nettle, curly-dock, wildwood violets
I left especially to retard your way!
of character, some soup of unkown stock...
As of now I hear my unknown neighbors
with CD or DVD at some 90 decibel,
the bass cranked to some amphetamine level...
It’s rarely ever quiet here in the so-called sticks.
This citified forest houses, maybe, 5 or 6 each block
(count the mail-boxes as you drive round
and while you’re at it, snoopy boomer,
take down the numbers on the Realtors’ signs).
Once-muffled traffic has grown louder yearly,
every new owner leveling a tree-towered lot,
selling the boles for pulpwood and burning
the stumps uprooted by the same machination
that fuels this yearning for Victorian lawns.
A level un-grassed plot, smooth as a cemetery,
fresh-raked earth, and within its periphery
a house plunked down, dumb as a tombstone
planted too soon in un-fertile ground––
such slack imagination cannot stifle my yawns...
I’ll be moving on soon, so have at it!
Snoopy boomer! Tear down the trees,
mow down the house, and gravel the drive!
Just as if no-one ever lived here while I was live...
By the way, make the driveway circular––
it’ll be easier for the EMT’s (or the coroner)
to snatch you up after another hard day
of digging up the creeping-charley, oxalis,
stinging nettle, curly-dock, wildwood violets
I left especially to retard your way!
Issue No. 7, Wilderness - The Old Man from Winter
Disappointment awaited David’s return from the final day of fifth grade; not a bowl of salsa con queso, not a knock on the door from a good friend, not even a long nap. Mrs. David, determined not to enter summer without spring cleaning, shoved a box of trash bags into his peach-fuzzed arms and barked, “Clean your room or there’ll be no supper!”
David was unfamiliar with the word “supper” but nevertheless took the bags and went upstairs. He pushed against his bedroom door, wedging his way through a mound of paper. A four-foot stratum of work from grades zero to five covered his entire bedroom floor––hay he was now expected to spin into a decent sixth-grader’s bedroom. His backpack, once calmly hanging from his left shoulder, slid off in shock.
David had heard many of his classmates over the last few months, and indeed over the last few months of every school year, describe detailed plans of burning their schoolwork once graduated from the grade. But David was never invited to any such bonfire, never saw smoke rising from the neighborhood or smelt any textbook ash. Though he wishfully searched his pockets for a box of matches, he figured everyone’s work ended up like this, piled in the closet till it was piled in the bedroom.
He picked up a packet of envelopes postmarked Phoenix and return addressed in a boyish hand, “Jonathan.” These David quickly remembered were one half of a pen-pal project launched by his lonely third-grade teacher. David was assigned Jonathan and Jonathan David, alike in age but as far apart in experience as they were miles. David slid out a piece of wide-ruled Arizona loose-leaf and reread:
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t you go to school? Snow here is just paper squares in the mall. What is it there? Why would it stop school? Does snow make everyone sick? If you’re sick, feel better. But you said you spent the day sledding and throwing balls of the square paper at each other. Do you have paper cuts? It makes me sad thinking I had to be at school and you were allowed to have fun.”
David returned the page and dropped the envelopes back on the pile of parchment, or, as Jonathan would have it, the blizzard. He sighed a sigh so deep a corner of wrinkled vellum on the other side of the room raised its head a bit in the breeze. He picked up another page and vowed to chuck it out but he stared at it instead. He found himself in vertigo; teetering at the top of a long, long division problem and watching the answer sway below him.
When he pulled his eyes back up he noticed ten points for “work shown” marked in red at the top of the page. Work shown was time wasted, he lamented. There, beside the meaningless characters of the date “11/17,” he discovered that that “work shown,” so fundamental for the advancement to the next day, had in fact nothing at all to do with the advancement of years. “It’s not because of this I’m eleven years old,” he thought to the paper.
Just as Mrs. David opened her mouth to object, David said, “I’m breaking,” and went outside. What he thought he needed was a really exotic drink, or even just a cup of ice with a curly straw and an umbrella, but he settled for the porch swing.
House painters were packing up for the day and reminded David that grownups don’t have summer breaks, and sadder than never having snow days is never having summer breaks. He rested with the sad thought while rocking the porch swing––as best he could without floor touching toes—and itching what used to be a standard buzz cut, now just a shaggy mess. He was feeling around for lice when he noticed the neighbor’s hedges across the street rustling without wind. He narrowed his eyes. A boot poked out from under the bush and the more David squinted the more he could make out a figure extending up from the boot. It was a lumpy figure, and dark, and while David was trying to find some waist between the top lump and the bottom lump, a face came out from the hedge, its eyes directed at David’s.
The face, hauntingly expressive of some unnamed anxiety, further saddened rather than shocked David and he returned the face’s stare. From face the lump became chest and legs as the figure moved out to the driveway. The boots David could see now were snow boots and the pants were snow pants, the top a thick, grey jacket. The man wore mittens, earmuffs, and a big, black woolen hat. He stepped onto the road and walked slowly across, seemingly propelled by the vibrations running from coat to boot. He was old, weathered, and wrinkled. His lips were blue and cracked where they weren’t chapped. He appeared even stranger in the middle of the street, like an astronaut who, rather than playfully leaping, suffered from extreme gravity.
The man came right up to the foot of David’s porch.
“Are you looking for something?” David asked.
The man only shook.
“Back in that bush, what were you looking for?”
The old man sunk his hands further into his armpits and pulled down his hat. “Kindling.”
“What’s that?”
“Little ones,” said the old man.
“Little what?”
“Kindle. I want to kindle.”
“Where are you from?”
“I…” The man stopped.
“Aren’t you from somewhere?”
David got a little scared and thought back on his What To Do With Strangers lessons from kindergarten, probably listed on a worksheet somewhere upstairs.
“I think I hear my mom calling me.” David stood up and put his hand against the screen door. He would have gone through had the man not shaken out a stream of words from his mouth, of which David could only piece together: “I chop wood, most of the day. I use it at night. Keeps the bills down. My daughter’ll call me. She needs money. I have to get to the bank but I can’t get out. They plowed me in. But I can keep chopping if I have to. I have to keep chopping. I can go through piles of wood, my whole backyard covered in piles of wood.”
The old man jerked his head to the side and set his eyes off down the street to an even older man with a long, white beard. David looked, too.
“The crossing guard?” he asked.
The man down the street did indeed wear an orange reflective vest under his beard and helped usher a stream of children beneath him.
“What about him?”
“Piles of wood, piles and piles of wood.” The man’s gaze softened and his head sunk back to his chest.
“You know,” said David, touched by the man’s gaze, “I actually have some piles of my own that need chopping.”
“Can’t stop moving. Too cold. Stop moving and I’ll be my pipes.”
David let out his hand. “We don’t want that,” he said.
The old man took a step towards the porch but shot his eyes up quick to the crossing guard again.
“Come on in.”
Mrs. David was falling asleep on a pile of warm laundry when her son and an old man in winter clothing woke her up.
“What is that?” she said, half asleep, at the figure in the woolen cap.
“He’ll be helping me with my bedroom,” David said. “For a third of my allowance I think we can get it in tip top shape.”
“That’s really weird, David,” said Mrs. David, falling back into her towels.
David went to the kitchen. “Hi-C? Capri-Sun? Sierra Mist?”
“Hot chocolate,” the man garbled.
“OK, hot chocolate…”
The old man looked around a little at the decoration while David drank and went on about the injustice of his mother sleeping. The man saw paintings of watermelons, little wooden lighthouses, refrigerator magnets in the shape of crabs. He held his hot chocolate up to his face as if to barricade himself from these strange surrounding objects. It seemed the only relief to his confused eyes was the constant, agitated shaking of his body.
David threw his cup into the sink. “Ready to work?”
A few stacks had to be toppled for David to open the door of his room again, but he managed. He scaled to the top of his bed and stood up, looking out over the room.
“All this,” he said, “is elementary school. Get rid of it.”
The old man was not sufficiently impressed in David’s opinion; maybe he wasn’t lying about all those piles of wood. The man bent over and began stuffing his first bag. He wasn’t quick about it, but he did indeed keep moving. He mumbled as he worked, and again David picked up words like “daughter” and “bills.” The nervous energy with which the man spoke seemed to go directly into his cleaning, as if the room would move towards cleanliness with all the slow force of his life moving towards despair. As a corner of carpet became reacquainted with the sun, David noticed that the old man never once stopped to look at any of the papers he was disposing. David couldn’t have picked up two sheets without reading everything on them, being reminded of the dim, dank, winter days he scribed them and then being transported to that same dim, dank mood. But then, the old man had no reason to explore such days and moods––he was already in them. He knew, or sensed, that the papers were filled with meaningless toil and, being no stranger to the concept himself, he meaninglessly toiled through them. He seemed at home.
Saddened by this, David slid off his bed and made an exit. “God’s speed,” he said.
Downstairs, Mrs. David was nowhere nearer to folding the laundry but was instead having a very pleasant dream about falling asleep on the laundry.
“You gotta get yourself your own weirdo, Mom,” David said to her on his way out. He returned to the porch swing but this time without the dread of cleaning up the past five years’ refuse. It had taken care of itself. He finally felt that classic summer freedom. The earth had reached the part of the solar system where the air smells better and there aren’t any problems; problems were piled on the opposite side where poor Mercury was probably trudging through right then. His feet didn’t make it when he tried to kick them up onto the railing but he didn’t mind, they swung back under him, swinging him into a wonderful slumber.
“Mr. Walter!” Mrs. David screamed, waking David outside. “Thank you so much!”
David rubbed his eyes and brought his feet back down to the porch. Inside he found the old man still dressed for a blizzard and shaking to boot. His mother was clapping and smiling. The laundry on the couch was no longer on the couch but folded into neat piles and placed in the basket.
“That’s so kind of you, Mr. Walter! David, you know Mr. Walter, don’t you?”
“Well…” David said.
“From down the street! How’s Mrs. Walter? I haven’t seen you two in ages! You sure are bundled up. Do you want something to drink?”
“I already gave him some hot chocolate,” said David.
The old man started shaking his way to the door.
“Well, OK, Mr. Walter, thanks so much for stopping by and, and––helping out. And be careful in that sun out there. But you and Mrs. Walter must be used to that, what with you two being from–– you two are from the southwest aren’t you? Where are you from originally?”
David gave his mother a look of hopelessness for the question, but the old man, half out the screen door, gave voice to his first few unmumbled words.
“Four months ago,” he said, and left.
“Odd man,” said Mrs. David. “Helpful.” She lay back down on the sofa and ran her hand over the perfectly level laundry.
David gave his bedroom door another hard push but the door flew open and David landed on his bed––his made bed. He sat up and after blinking a few times saw only wall-to-wall, naked carpet. He dropped down to look under the bed and make sure the old man wasn’t cheating, but David found more carpet. Strange too was the smell in the air, like some apothecary’s stew of tree sap, hot chocolate, and worry. David followed the smell to the trashcan by his desk. Inside were the ashes of his homework, the corner characters “11/17” glowing red and then consumed by black.
He ran to the window. There, down the sidewalk, David saw the old man limping on, probably to another bush, and some twenty paces behind the old man was the crossing guard, running to catch up. The guard did not look quite like an old man, more like a young man with a long, fake beard. He looked as Shakespeare must have looked playing Father Time in A Winter’s Tale – a play that now lay smoldering in David’s trashcan.
David was unfamiliar with the word “supper” but nevertheless took the bags and went upstairs. He pushed against his bedroom door, wedging his way through a mound of paper. A four-foot stratum of work from grades zero to five covered his entire bedroom floor––hay he was now expected to spin into a decent sixth-grader’s bedroom. His backpack, once calmly hanging from his left shoulder, slid off in shock.
David had heard many of his classmates over the last few months, and indeed over the last few months of every school year, describe detailed plans of burning their schoolwork once graduated from the grade. But David was never invited to any such bonfire, never saw smoke rising from the neighborhood or smelt any textbook ash. Though he wishfully searched his pockets for a box of matches, he figured everyone’s work ended up like this, piled in the closet till it was piled in the bedroom.
He picked up a packet of envelopes postmarked Phoenix and return addressed in a boyish hand, “Jonathan.” These David quickly remembered were one half of a pen-pal project launched by his lonely third-grade teacher. David was assigned Jonathan and Jonathan David, alike in age but as far apart in experience as they were miles. David slid out a piece of wide-ruled Arizona loose-leaf and reread:
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t you go to school? Snow here is just paper squares in the mall. What is it there? Why would it stop school? Does snow make everyone sick? If you’re sick, feel better. But you said you spent the day sledding and throwing balls of the square paper at each other. Do you have paper cuts? It makes me sad thinking I had to be at school and you were allowed to have fun.”
David returned the page and dropped the envelopes back on the pile of parchment, or, as Jonathan would have it, the blizzard. He sighed a sigh so deep a corner of wrinkled vellum on the other side of the room raised its head a bit in the breeze. He picked up another page and vowed to chuck it out but he stared at it instead. He found himself in vertigo; teetering at the top of a long, long division problem and watching the answer sway below him.
When he pulled his eyes back up he noticed ten points for “work shown” marked in red at the top of the page. Work shown was time wasted, he lamented. There, beside the meaningless characters of the date “11/17,” he discovered that that “work shown,” so fundamental for the advancement to the next day, had in fact nothing at all to do with the advancement of years. “It’s not because of this I’m eleven years old,” he thought to the paper.
Just as Mrs. David opened her mouth to object, David said, “I’m breaking,” and went outside. What he thought he needed was a really exotic drink, or even just a cup of ice with a curly straw and an umbrella, but he settled for the porch swing.
House painters were packing up for the day and reminded David that grownups don’t have summer breaks, and sadder than never having snow days is never having summer breaks. He rested with the sad thought while rocking the porch swing––as best he could without floor touching toes—and itching what used to be a standard buzz cut, now just a shaggy mess. He was feeling around for lice when he noticed the neighbor’s hedges across the street rustling without wind. He narrowed his eyes. A boot poked out from under the bush and the more David squinted the more he could make out a figure extending up from the boot. It was a lumpy figure, and dark, and while David was trying to find some waist between the top lump and the bottom lump, a face came out from the hedge, its eyes directed at David’s.
The face, hauntingly expressive of some unnamed anxiety, further saddened rather than shocked David and he returned the face’s stare. From face the lump became chest and legs as the figure moved out to the driveway. The boots David could see now were snow boots and the pants were snow pants, the top a thick, grey jacket. The man wore mittens, earmuffs, and a big, black woolen hat. He stepped onto the road and walked slowly across, seemingly propelled by the vibrations running from coat to boot. He was old, weathered, and wrinkled. His lips were blue and cracked where they weren’t chapped. He appeared even stranger in the middle of the street, like an astronaut who, rather than playfully leaping, suffered from extreme gravity.
The man came right up to the foot of David’s porch.
“Are you looking for something?” David asked.
The man only shook.
“Back in that bush, what were you looking for?”
The old man sunk his hands further into his armpits and pulled down his hat. “Kindling.”
“What’s that?”
“Little ones,” said the old man.
“Little what?”
“Kindle. I want to kindle.”
“Where are you from?”
“I…” The man stopped.
“Aren’t you from somewhere?”
David got a little scared and thought back on his What To Do With Strangers lessons from kindergarten, probably listed on a worksheet somewhere upstairs.
“I think I hear my mom calling me.” David stood up and put his hand against the screen door. He would have gone through had the man not shaken out a stream of words from his mouth, of which David could only piece together: “I chop wood, most of the day. I use it at night. Keeps the bills down. My daughter’ll call me. She needs money. I have to get to the bank but I can’t get out. They plowed me in. But I can keep chopping if I have to. I have to keep chopping. I can go through piles of wood, my whole backyard covered in piles of wood.”
The old man jerked his head to the side and set his eyes off down the street to an even older man with a long, white beard. David looked, too.
“The crossing guard?” he asked.
The man down the street did indeed wear an orange reflective vest under his beard and helped usher a stream of children beneath him.
“What about him?”
“Piles of wood, piles and piles of wood.” The man’s gaze softened and his head sunk back to his chest.
“You know,” said David, touched by the man’s gaze, “I actually have some piles of my own that need chopping.”
“Can’t stop moving. Too cold. Stop moving and I’ll be my pipes.”
David let out his hand. “We don’t want that,” he said.
The old man took a step towards the porch but shot his eyes up quick to the crossing guard again.
“Come on in.”
Mrs. David was falling asleep on a pile of warm laundry when her son and an old man in winter clothing woke her up.
“What is that?” she said, half asleep, at the figure in the woolen cap.
“He’ll be helping me with my bedroom,” David said. “For a third of my allowance I think we can get it in tip top shape.”
“That’s really weird, David,” said Mrs. David, falling back into her towels.
David went to the kitchen. “Hi-C? Capri-Sun? Sierra Mist?”
“Hot chocolate,” the man garbled.
“OK, hot chocolate…”
The old man looked around a little at the decoration while David drank and went on about the injustice of his mother sleeping. The man saw paintings of watermelons, little wooden lighthouses, refrigerator magnets in the shape of crabs. He held his hot chocolate up to his face as if to barricade himself from these strange surrounding objects. It seemed the only relief to his confused eyes was the constant, agitated shaking of his body.
David threw his cup into the sink. “Ready to work?”
A few stacks had to be toppled for David to open the door of his room again, but he managed. He scaled to the top of his bed and stood up, looking out over the room.
“All this,” he said, “is elementary school. Get rid of it.”
The old man was not sufficiently impressed in David’s opinion; maybe he wasn’t lying about all those piles of wood. The man bent over and began stuffing his first bag. He wasn’t quick about it, but he did indeed keep moving. He mumbled as he worked, and again David picked up words like “daughter” and “bills.” The nervous energy with which the man spoke seemed to go directly into his cleaning, as if the room would move towards cleanliness with all the slow force of his life moving towards despair. As a corner of carpet became reacquainted with the sun, David noticed that the old man never once stopped to look at any of the papers he was disposing. David couldn’t have picked up two sheets without reading everything on them, being reminded of the dim, dank, winter days he scribed them and then being transported to that same dim, dank mood. But then, the old man had no reason to explore such days and moods––he was already in them. He knew, or sensed, that the papers were filled with meaningless toil and, being no stranger to the concept himself, he meaninglessly toiled through them. He seemed at home.
Saddened by this, David slid off his bed and made an exit. “God’s speed,” he said.
Downstairs, Mrs. David was nowhere nearer to folding the laundry but was instead having a very pleasant dream about falling asleep on the laundry.
“You gotta get yourself your own weirdo, Mom,” David said to her on his way out. He returned to the porch swing but this time without the dread of cleaning up the past five years’ refuse. It had taken care of itself. He finally felt that classic summer freedom. The earth had reached the part of the solar system where the air smells better and there aren’t any problems; problems were piled on the opposite side where poor Mercury was probably trudging through right then. His feet didn’t make it when he tried to kick them up onto the railing but he didn’t mind, they swung back under him, swinging him into a wonderful slumber.
“Mr. Walter!” Mrs. David screamed, waking David outside. “Thank you so much!”
David rubbed his eyes and brought his feet back down to the porch. Inside he found the old man still dressed for a blizzard and shaking to boot. His mother was clapping and smiling. The laundry on the couch was no longer on the couch but folded into neat piles and placed in the basket.
“That’s so kind of you, Mr. Walter! David, you know Mr. Walter, don’t you?”
“Well…” David said.
“From down the street! How’s Mrs. Walter? I haven’t seen you two in ages! You sure are bundled up. Do you want something to drink?”
“I already gave him some hot chocolate,” said David.
The old man started shaking his way to the door.
“Well, OK, Mr. Walter, thanks so much for stopping by and, and––helping out. And be careful in that sun out there. But you and Mrs. Walter must be used to that, what with you two being from–– you two are from the southwest aren’t you? Where are you from originally?”
David gave his mother a look of hopelessness for the question, but the old man, half out the screen door, gave voice to his first few unmumbled words.
“Four months ago,” he said, and left.
“Odd man,” said Mrs. David. “Helpful.” She lay back down on the sofa and ran her hand over the perfectly level laundry.
David gave his bedroom door another hard push but the door flew open and David landed on his bed––his made bed. He sat up and after blinking a few times saw only wall-to-wall, naked carpet. He dropped down to look under the bed and make sure the old man wasn’t cheating, but David found more carpet. Strange too was the smell in the air, like some apothecary’s stew of tree sap, hot chocolate, and worry. David followed the smell to the trashcan by his desk. Inside were the ashes of his homework, the corner characters “11/17” glowing red and then consumed by black.
He ran to the window. There, down the sidewalk, David saw the old man limping on, probably to another bush, and some twenty paces behind the old man was the crossing guard, running to catch up. The guard did not look quite like an old man, more like a young man with a long, fake beard. He looked as Shakespeare must have looked playing Father Time in A Winter’s Tale – a play that now lay smoldering in David’s trashcan.
Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Ratzingers Wake, More Fiction than Non Dept.
The sound of typing thrills me. I expect it was the sound rather than the Fitzgerald that had Hunter S. Thompson typing The Great Gatsby word for word. Ready to type whatever was at hand, I happened upon The New Oxford Annotated Bible supporting a leg of my desk. I remembered as I watched the book slide back to the floor: a teacher from my wilderness days at a Christian private school once told my classmates and I to underline the word “mountain” every time it appeared in that Bible. He had us do the same in Shane.
A young woman ran up to her priest after the mass. She pulled out a copy of Newsweek from her tote bag. “Did you know the Pope wrote a book?” she asked. “He’s written tons a books,” said the priest. “Am I supposed to read it?” The priest shrugged. “If you want to.”
I began at the beginning of the middle, Matthew, and moved forward from there. Weeks later I had one dry ribbon and four versions of the same story. James Joyce collected the four gospel authors themselves into one primordial writer, Mamalujo. And good thing too Joyce did so without a computer, where pesky red squiggles would have underlined every word.
The young woman found the last copy of Jesus of Nazareth in Barnes and Noble. She turned to the back and read: “About the Author. The author is the Pope.” Convinced, she bought the book. She ordered a sweet tea from the café and began to fulfill her Catholic duty.
Mamalujo, repetitive, conflicted, forced his hero to reenact all of human history in the hopes of fulfilling it. Central to Jesus’ play-acting is a troublesome retreat to the wilderness. Troublesome, since this reversion to the private sector takes place just after Jesus’ diluvian plunge with the Baptist, the beginning of his public activity. The Pope himself interrupts this narrative to ask, why did Jesus, hours after throwing his name into the hat of history, withdraw to begin his work in total obscurity? What a strange beginning! he says.
Three pages in and the young woman was having a Finnegans Wake experience with the Pope’s new book. As she felt obligated to read anything her spiritual father had written, so she felt the need to begin with preface and introduction. But these preambles did nothing to inspire a turning page. They were a tangled thicket of academic allusions and the poor young woman could only crawl blindly along the esoterra firma. “What an awful beginning!” she thought.
As we learn from Borges’s Pierre Menard, translator of Don Quixote, literal re-writing does not change questions into answers. In fact, it does not even recognize questions. Soon, your eye sends the shape of a letter to your fingers and your brain is no longer required; questions are no longer asked. As I hammered away mindlessly, troublesome sections seemed to solve themselves and nascent images of wilderness simply floated up in my mind: the desert was really a nursery of pine trees––small, uniform, good for hide and seek with prophets and devils. Jesus the man, full of anger and obscure motivation, becomes Jesus the God, gentle, unquestionable, when retyped.
Tote bag saddled behind her, the young woman again approached her priest. “It’s a bust,” she said, “It’s too hard to understand.” The priest smiled and turned away but the young woman grabbed his shoulder. “Here, I found this helps.” She took from her tote bag a large manuscript, the words “Jesus of Nazareth by the Pope” typed on the front. “My version’s a little clearer,” she said.
A young woman ran up to her priest after the mass. She pulled out a copy of Newsweek from her tote bag. “Did you know the Pope wrote a book?” she asked. “He’s written tons a books,” said the priest. “Am I supposed to read it?” The priest shrugged. “If you want to.”
I began at the beginning of the middle, Matthew, and moved forward from there. Weeks later I had one dry ribbon and four versions of the same story. James Joyce collected the four gospel authors themselves into one primordial writer, Mamalujo. And good thing too Joyce did so without a computer, where pesky red squiggles would have underlined every word.
The young woman found the last copy of Jesus of Nazareth in Barnes and Noble. She turned to the back and read: “About the Author. The author is the Pope.” Convinced, she bought the book. She ordered a sweet tea from the café and began to fulfill her Catholic duty.
Mamalujo, repetitive, conflicted, forced his hero to reenact all of human history in the hopes of fulfilling it. Central to Jesus’ play-acting is a troublesome retreat to the wilderness. Troublesome, since this reversion to the private sector takes place just after Jesus’ diluvian plunge with the Baptist, the beginning of his public activity. The Pope himself interrupts this narrative to ask, why did Jesus, hours after throwing his name into the hat of history, withdraw to begin his work in total obscurity? What a strange beginning! he says.
Three pages in and the young woman was having a Finnegans Wake experience with the Pope’s new book. As she felt obligated to read anything her spiritual father had written, so she felt the need to begin with preface and introduction. But these preambles did nothing to inspire a turning page. They were a tangled thicket of academic allusions and the poor young woman could only crawl blindly along the esoterra firma. “What an awful beginning!” she thought.
As we learn from Borges’s Pierre Menard, translator of Don Quixote, literal re-writing does not change questions into answers. In fact, it does not even recognize questions. Soon, your eye sends the shape of a letter to your fingers and your brain is no longer required; questions are no longer asked. As I hammered away mindlessly, troublesome sections seemed to solve themselves and nascent images of wilderness simply floated up in my mind: the desert was really a nursery of pine trees––small, uniform, good for hide and seek with prophets and devils. Jesus the man, full of anger and obscure motivation, becomes Jesus the God, gentle, unquestionable, when retyped.
Tote bag saddled behind her, the young woman again approached her priest. “It’s a bust,” she said, “It’s too hard to understand.” The priest smiled and turned away but the young woman grabbed his shoulder. “Here, I found this helps.” She took from her tote bag a large manuscript, the words “Jesus of Nazareth by the Pope” typed on the front. “My version’s a little clearer,” she said.
Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Deserts and Underwoods
Contributors: Alexa Garvoille, Jim Garvoille, Jill Ostrowski, Jonathan Tuttle
Funding: Nancy Ball
Issue No. 6, Pop - Boy Becomes Discman
American Idol was on Wednesday night. I snuck down to Barnes and Noble behind the nation’s back.
I was so happy Italy won the World Cup, I ran straight out and bought a copy of Vogue Italia.
I danced so hard my mirror fogged.
Boy becomes Discman.
I was so happy Italy won the World Cup, I ran straight out and bought a copy of Vogue Italia.
I danced so hard my mirror fogged.
Boy becomes Discman.
Issue No. 6, Pop - Gentlemen, Where Are Your Socks?
“Gentlemen, before we begin, I do have a few words to say about decorum. I was shopping with my daughter for a bathing suit at Target this weekend. I saw a number of you there and more of your person than I’d like. I saw your feet, dried calluses, rising veins – your feet, gentlemen! I understand, as exchequer and exemplar, I may be responsible for this alarming fad. I do remember letting my ankles show once or twice but I will never do it again and, gentlemen, if you value your positions I suggest you fo thr smewq–“Penelope tired fast of typing. She replaced her Dictaphone headphones with radio ear buds. Johnny Late Riser, her favorite DJ, took the morning shift at KWOW and played her everything she needed to get the blood flowing back to her tips. She flipped through a glossy fashion magazine while she listened, timing the turns of the pages to the symbol crashes in the songs. Soon her licked finger just slid off the corner of the page in a puddle of saliva instead of picking it up, and she returned to another five-minute stint of yesterday’s minutes.
“’Bout time for your lunch, pet,” said the boss, pulling his belt up over his gut as he walked out of the office. “I bet lover boy’s waiting for you right now.”
“Oh yes,” Penelope swooned, “He always waits.”
“Well don’t keep him too long, he’s not getting any better looking waiting in my lobby.”
A cutting comment, but Penelope had been going out with Fon for going on a year and any reservations she might have had at first about his height, skin, and limp were long gone.
“If it’s all the same, I think I’ll listen to the radio a little more. It’s so romantic just knowing he’s down there.”
“Suit yourself,” said the boss, walking back into his office. “The Anniversary Parade meeting’s this afternoon. Look sharp.” The door slam hit a particularly jealous note.
Eventually, Penelope rode the elevator down the bottom fifteen floors of the Renaissance Plaza and there was Fon, a flower made of carrot peels held out in his hand. They walked as they did every lunch hour (the hour between ten and eleven when no one else was out), arm in arm down three blocks to the West Wind Café, a two-table Vietnamese restaurant owned and operated by Fon’s father.
“It getting cloudy today, Pen,” said Fon.
“Certainly doesn’t bode well for the parade,” said Penelope.
“Is bad luck for my question.”
Penelope and Fon took the seat by the window. Penelope powdered her cheeks and Fon relished his time away from bussing tables.
“Stupid boy!” said his father, dropping two menus onto the table. “You take my last carrot flower!”
“Good morning, Mr. Hingtzu,” said Penelope. “I’ll just have the usual.”
Fon grinned and handed back the menus. “The usual.”
Mumbling Vietnamese curses, Mr. Hingtzu threw a towel over his shoulder and went back into the kitchen.
“It been almost a year,” Fon said, taking Penelope’s hand. “I have question for you.”
Penelope cocked her head and looked up at the sky. “Those floats get soggy in the rain,” she said.
“I’m ready to ask my question now.”
Penelope brought her head back. “Question?”
Six captains of industry burst through the door for an early lunch. Together they threw their ties over their shoulders and pounded their silverware against the table.
Mr. Hingtzu ran out of the kitchen, all smiles and menus. “Good morning, my sirs!” He pointed to Fon and snapped his fingers. “Water, now!”
“But…” Fon squeezed Penelope’s hand.
“It’s all right,” said Penelope. “There’s plenty more to type.”
Fon rose and set about pouring water for each of the hogs that took him away from his beloved.
Penelope sat and admired him working for a moment then rose as well, put her compact in her purse and walked back to the office.
“General Tso’s for me,” said a hog. “You listening? I said General Tso’s!”
Fon trembled, a pitcher of water in his hand and a tear welling in his eye. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
The next day and Penelope was hard at work transcribing yesterday’s tapes. “Last year’s parade was a mess! I was humiliated and I damn well hope you sockless bastards were humiliated, too! All in the way of saying, gentlemen, that tomorrow morning we will be having a dress rehearsal! No, gentlemen, I don’t want to hear it, the majorettes will be here and thas anirh tjug–“
Penelope took off her headphones and twirled a pencil between her fingers to get the blood back. She switched on the radio.
“Oh, Johnny. Always the right song at the right time.” She closed her eyes and let her heels slip off.
A good fifteen minutes she spent bobbing and swaying in her chair and she would have danced longer if it weren’t for the fifty majorettes that came walking by her desk and into the boss’s office.
“If he wants to make me jealous, he’ll have to try harder than that,” she said. “I’m sure Fon is coming for me right now.” She got out the Dictaphone and rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter.
“And that’s another thing, gentlemen. Half our audience was asleep last year. We got to shock, provoke! Think, what’s better than a bunch of batons being thrown up in the air? At tomorrow’s dress rehearsal, we will implement my plans…my plans…is someone going to fix this projector? We will implement my plans at ten o’clock a.m. to fling from this very window dozens of twirling batons like so much ticker tape at the–“
Penelope jumped to her feet and looked to the clock on the wall. Ten o’clock. She let out a childish whimper.
Overcast skies meant nothing to Fon as he waited outside, the perfectly worded question in his best American accent running through his mind and a flower made of ginger peels perfuming his hand. He was the only one on the sidewalk, the only one in the world really, and he felt like bursting into song. He even tried. He spread out his legs and reached out his arms, threw his pimpled, doughy head back and opened his mouth. “Happy Anniversary!” cried the plumed majorettes, and fifty spinning batons fell from the fifteenth floor of the Renaissance Plaza, filling the overcast sky and looking to Fon like the most beautiful constellation, for he could even see, behind the stars, the smiling gods who created them. Then he was pummeled, pummeled dearly.
Issue No. 6, Pop - Pretty in Pink Indeed
Andie Walsh worked at a record store called Trax. Her boss, Iona, stapled LP’s to the ceiling as decoration. A child tried to snitch a cassette and Iona shot a staple at him. “This ain’t the public library,” she said.
Mid-eighties Chicago was overcoats and indie rock. School wasn’t school, but being bullied by a rich kid. And work wasn’t work, but sitting behind a counter and turning the pages of a magazine. Andie did that a lot, but I could never figure out which magazine it was.
I know Andie liked fashion, but what music, what movies? She would like the films of the British New Wave, those late-fifties black and white townscapes of kind-hearted young people stuck on the wrong side of the tracks; like Andie, stuck, and the train never comes for London.
Critics argue that for all their contemporaneity, the New Wave filmmakers turned a deaf ear to pop music, relying instead on jazz scores that compromised their progressive intentions with a conservative’s lust for the past.
Funny thing, too, that the New Wave films have no pop music, because where would modern indie music be without the New Wave? Belle and Sebastian’s “The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Smiths’ “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, the Arctic Monkeys’ “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
In the mid-eighties, a sixteen year-old boy named Mark Taylor sorted out connections between pop music and the New Wave cinema for a fanzine he wrote called Smiths Indeed. Staying up late in his Bristol bedroom, he kept his parents awake as he tried to lay out headlines using Letraset on his typewriter.
It’s possible Andie was reading Smiths Indeed when she should have been shelving new seven-inchers. There were posters for the The Smiths all over Trax and Duckie, the poor boy who loved her, listened to the group when it rained.
H.B. Gilmour wrote a novelization of Pretty In Pink in 1988. I’ve worked with the reference librarians at my local public library but we can’t find it anywhere. Still, my nostalgia will not abate and I’ve stolen a typewriter and a record player so I can spend my bedroom nights writing my own novelization. “If you’ve no world of your own,” John Osborne wrote in Look Back in Anger, “it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”
Mid-eighties Chicago was overcoats and indie rock. School wasn’t school, but being bullied by a rich kid. And work wasn’t work, but sitting behind a counter and turning the pages of a magazine. Andie did that a lot, but I could never figure out which magazine it was.
I know Andie liked fashion, but what music, what movies? She would like the films of the British New Wave, those late-fifties black and white townscapes of kind-hearted young people stuck on the wrong side of the tracks; like Andie, stuck, and the train never comes for London.
Critics argue that for all their contemporaneity, the New Wave filmmakers turned a deaf ear to pop music, relying instead on jazz scores that compromised their progressive intentions with a conservative’s lust for the past.
Funny thing, too, that the New Wave films have no pop music, because where would modern indie music be without the New Wave? Belle and Sebastian’s “The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Smiths’ “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, the Arctic Monkeys’ “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
In the mid-eighties, a sixteen year-old boy named Mark Taylor sorted out connections between pop music and the New Wave cinema for a fanzine he wrote called Smiths Indeed. Staying up late in his Bristol bedroom, he kept his parents awake as he tried to lay out headlines using Letraset on his typewriter.
It’s possible Andie was reading Smiths Indeed when she should have been shelving new seven-inchers. There were posters for the The Smiths all over Trax and Duckie, the poor boy who loved her, listened to the group when it rained.
H.B. Gilmour wrote a novelization of Pretty In Pink in 1988. I’ve worked with the reference librarians at my local public library but we can’t find it anywhere. Still, my nostalgia will not abate and I’ve stolen a typewriter and a record player so I can spend my bedroom nights writing my own novelization. “If you’ve no world of your own,” John Osborne wrote in Look Back in Anger, “it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”
Issue No. 5, History - Red Tailed Hawks, 1925
wo remarkable events happened the winter I was fourteen: my Daddy lost his job and Floyd Collins got himself stuck down a cave.
My daddy worked at the tobacconists down by the coal camp and he knew Carl Carlisle since his school days, but all the same, Carl said it was getting tight around the store and he’d have to let him go and he hoped he didn’t mind. At least that’s what Daddy said. Mama was angrier than he was and broke two wooden spoons on the kitchen table and cursed to surprise even me. Daddy just kind of wandered, not walked, out the kitchen door and went down the road without his winter hat. He wasn’t home for dinner and Mama said he could just stay at the Blue Hog as long as he wanted for all she cared but that night she went and got him anyway.
The next day, at school, I heard about Floyd. Mama told the class, “That Collins boy’s missing and they think he’s caught in a cave. This is why your folks don’t want you running around the caves by yourself.”
Some of the boys seemed excited, whispering to each other across the aisle, and some of the girls began to squirm, and Lila, who cried at least once a week in school, began to sniffle. Her voice shook and her nose ran as she asked Mama, “Is he going to die down there?”
“Shush, now. He’ll be just fine. They’ve got men who know every cave in Kentucky out there and the police and Collins family. They’ll probably get him out before the end of the day.” Mama did not look at Lila as she spoke. Mama never looked at you when you cried.
Lydon Hopstreet was one of the best looking boys in eighth grade and Mama liked him all right and I guess so did I.
She told Daddy, “The youngest Hopstreet is sweet on Clemmy.”
He looked at me. “And?”
“He wants to take her out with his family after church,” she said.
Daddy ran his bread heel through the last of the gravy on his plate. “I suppose that’d be fine.”
“I’ll give you something in case they don’t bother for lunch,” Mama told me. She took the bread basket off the table and snapped her hand towel at the crumbs on the table, sending them to the floor.
“He’s a nice boy,” I said to Daddy, guessing.
He nodded and kept his head down.
Daddy was home now during the day and out at night. I used to know how to talk to him after school, after dinner, before bed. But I stopped telling him about school because he didn’t like to hear about Mama’s work. When I saw him, he looked uncomfortable to be around his own house. It made me feel like maybe I should be uncomfortable, too.
He paced the creaky floorboards like the little bear the Doggards kept in a cage by the side of the road. For a nickel, you could walk right up to him and watch him throw his shoulders against the side of the cage to make the cage and you rattle. The bear seemed stronger, and smaller, than I’d expected.
Pastor Olsen rubbed his hands together and took a drink of water. Several babies began to cry.
The church was a one-story farmhouse with the walls between the living room and dining room knocked down to make room for twenty pews. The air inside didn’t move. I shifted in my seat and sighed. I tried to straighten the hem of my dress, which crumpled no matter how many times Mama ironed it. My Sunday dress was fading badly and I began to become a little ashamed of it, especially because Lydon would take me out after. I hoped to find a newer-looking dress at the camp second hand shop, but nothing fit. I was getting fat in the stomach. Pastor Olsen had us pray for Floyd, and for everyone who was lost.
At fourteen, I had already mastered the art of half-paying attention to Pastor Olsen. It got so I only listened when he talked about himself.
“About eleven at night on August eighth, the late Julius Hanson, a neighbor, came to inform us that my sister had been in an accident. One of my parents asked if she was hurt. Mr. Hanson answered, ‘She’s dead.’ Some of the first words my Mother said, in Norwegian, were, ‘Oh, where is her soul?’ It took this tragedy in our home to bring my Mother back to the Holy Father. It became also the means to stir my heart again into the realization of my lostness and my need of deliverance.”
I had buried three tomcats but I’d never had a relative die. Probably just because we didn’t have many, Mama and Daddy being just about the only ones left as far as I knew.
After church, I met Lydon’s family and we all went to see Floyd. I was so happy to be out of the house for a whole day. Lydon’s Uncle Brewster was in town from Louisville and had brought his Model T. Lydon kept elbowing me as he walked towards it, saying, “Not bad, huh?” but it looked like the toys the younger kids at school played with, only gone huge and silly. It was unnaturally shiny. Nothing was shiny in January except, sometimes, the crick when it froze through. Lydon grinned as his uncle pulled down a divider seat for us in the back of the car.
I’d made a honey and butter sandwich that morning and kept it in my coat pocket. I thought I could throw it down to Floyd, who was probably not getting many honey sandwiches. I also brought a comb and powder case I made Mama buy for me, which seemed to try her.
“You’re going to waste my money on that nonsense. At your age,” she said, scowling, as she handed over the money.
Lydon sat next to me and sometimes his knee would bump mine, making my stomach hurt. His mom and aunt sat across from us and didn’t stop talking for a breath till Brewster leaned back and shouted, “We’re here. Will you take a look at this traffic? Looks like half Kentucky showed up.”
“My word,” Lydon’s mother said as she peered out the window. “These buggies need to get out of our way. Honk the horn, Brewster.”
More people were standing outside that hole in the ground than I’d ever seen at the county fair. I couldn’t get close enough to see the hole, much less throw down my sandwich. And the folks ahead of me and Lydon weren’t even talking to Floyd. Far as I could tell, they were talking to each other, and mostly about sports and taxes. There was Bub Former and those two McGuires who used to run the coal camp general store, where folks bought their calico, needles, hangover remedies, salve and any number of elixirs to soothe sooty lungs, all of them talking a mile a minute as if they were still important, as if anyone had to listen to them anymore. Some of the men I recognized by their voices, size, shoulder slopes, by their hands, but their faces looked naked and bleached without a layer of coal dust. Only a few people seemed to remember Floyd was there.
“Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was headed?” a man said.
“Wouldn’t’ve done him any good.”
“Hope he’s got a coat.”
“How long you suppose you could go without food?”
“About six hours.”
Lydon lead me around the outside of the crowd. He asked me if I enjoyed church that day and I asked him how his geography project was going. He said he hadn’t started yet. I said he should consider Egypt. “It’s just deserts and one big river,” I said. We passed a cluster of men around a fiddler and I hoped Floyd couldn’t hear the music.
It was cold and unpleasantly bright that day. Too bright to see, too cold to smell. A blue jay screamed at the trespassers from an ash tree nearby.
Lydon bought me a sock doll with button eyes and a yarn mouth that had Floyd Collins, ’25 stitched onto its chest. So I’d remember. I wondered which inventive town person had come up with that idea. Someone was selling hot tea and someone else had sandwiches. All the people laughing and chattering made me feel restless and wrong. Two men ushered two other men into a buggy parked under a Pignut and in a moment, the visitors left with smothered smiles and two tin cups. Lydon elbowed me again. “Think we should get something to drink?” he asked. I didn’t know how he meant it, so I laughed. He looked handsome when he didn’t have that grin on his face. It made him look like a little boy, apple-cheeked and laughing at some stupid joke. I felt silly standing next to him.
“That’s a Red Tailed Hawk,” Lydon told me, pointing to a vulture who was circling higher and higher until he disappeared.
When we met back up with his family, Lydon’s mother’s cheeks were bright red. “You’ll never guess where that lady was from. Cleveland. Doesn’t that beat all?”
“I think I met a gentleman from Memphis. Probably a businessman,” the aunt said with some tone of authority. "Said nothing can stop money in Tennessee, said sooner or later everyone here's going to move there, land of milk and honey and all that, called us the land of coal and lichen and I told him I don't even know what lichen is. Clementine," the aunt said and looked at me for the first time, "ask your mother what lichen is."
“Your mother,” Lydon’s mother told me, “should take you all here. To learn about caves and not wandering down every hole you see. And to wear a hat,” she said, then looked at the aunt. “I mean, really. No hat. No gloves.”
The aunt nodded her head solemnly, like people did at church. “And can you imagine how his mother must feel?”
“Maybe I should send her something.”
“You’re too thoughtful.” The aunt plucked a pill from her felt skirt and flicked it Lydon-ward. "There's money in lichen, you think?"
“It’ll give me a chance to try that new sweet potato pie recipe.”
“Those army men look so strong,” the aunt said, sighing. The blue jay kept screaming.
“I might join the military,” Lydon told me, “when I’m older.”
“If I ever get stuck down a well or a cave,” his mother announced, “I hope they send those boys after me.”
“I think it’s a shame the police couldn’t do it on their own. Our boys have more important affairs to attend to than the Collins boy. And did you see the redhead soldier? My word.”
The next day, I couldn’t pay attention in school. I got worn out, always being around Mama, at home and at school, and never being around Daddy. I’d drift off during the day, thinking about that man stuck under the ground.
I wondered what songs he was humming to himself and I wondered what songs I would sing if I was in his place. Not Nearer My God to Thee, you can't sing that in the bottom of a cave. Maybe There's a Wideness, Abide With Me, or One Who is All Unfit. Or maybe just one of Clete Hindman's songs about ladies and the Blue Hog and wasn't Gray Hill better when he was young. I thought about how well he was sleeping, if he was sleeping. I also wondered if Daddy would want to see Floyd. Daddy wasn’t having any fun as it was and maybe the trip would be good for him. Show him that someone had it bad, too. And maybe he’d meet a man from a big town who’d give him a job and we could all move away but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to the cave. The radio said that morning that the men digging him out had caused a cave-in and blocked the entrance.
Mama yelled at me twice during the day and almost made me stay after school, except that I have to do that every day to wait for her anyway.
On the way home, she walked too quickly for me and I had to skip a step every once and a while to keep up.
She was holding her lips tight together and looked at me and said, “I know what’s been on your mind, lately,” like it was a threat. “It’s Lydon, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” was all I could say. I asked if she’d heard anything about Floyd during the day.
“No, thank God.”
“Why is it taking so long?”
“Because people are incompetent.”
“People?” I asked and looked at my shoes. “You think the army’ll be able to get him out?”
“They’d better. You can’t go without water for more than a week.”
“How long has it been?”
“More than a week. You know,” she said, “I heard an interview with the commander in charge of the scheme. He said they’re on track and that the last cave-in was part of their plan.” Mama rolled her eyes. She had embarrassingly little faith in the police or the army. That summer, the police wouldn’t charge our neighbor, Tom Salks, for shooting our beagle, Elmira. And the firemen, she says, let our barn burn down because we didn’t go to the dance they have every year. I’m not sure what she had against the army, but she sure didn’t seem to think much of them either.
“I prayed for Floyd last night,” I told her.
“Me, too.”
“You think he’ll be okay?” She didn’t answer. “Cause why pray if you don’t?” I said, a little nervous.
She stepped over a slush pile and said, “Try not to ruin your dress, will you?”
We kept the radio on all night at home, and Mama even put it on at recess. It became useful at home, because no one had to speak at dinner. We’d sit there, staring at the box like we could understand the voices better by looking at it. Mostly it was Floyd, but also there were crop estimates for the next year and harvest, general coal outrage, and, sometimes, a storywriter would come on and read us something. One was a true story about a man who saved his family and the neighbors from a bear by beating him to death with an axe handle. Sometimes, Lydon would come over for dinner. Then we’d talk some. I could tell that Lydon didn’t much like talking to his teacher at the dinner table and that Daddy seemed to frighten him. Seeing Lydon next to Daddy made Lydon look like a chubby, sleepy baby and Daddy like a lumberjack.
“You should’ve seen him before, though,” I told Lydon one night after dinner.
“Before what?”
I didn’t want to tell him. “Before winter. Before Floyd. You’ll like him better in the spring,” I said.
Lydon stretched. “I can’t wait for spring.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m gonna try out for the baseball team. Think I’ll make it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”
“Dinner was good. I love pork chops.”
“Yes,” I said.
A door shut and a wave of cold air rushed through the living room. “Was that your Dad?”
“Yes.” I began to feel as if I didn’t have to answer for Lydon to continue.
Daddy left after dinner, always, and it got so I didn’t like having Lydon over. He told me he thought it was strange Daddy didn’t stay and maybe I did, too.
Girls like Alice Ians or Greta Tomshaw’d giggle and ask me if Lydon’d kissed me and wanted to know everything about where we went and what we said to each other. I didn’t know what to tell them. “He’s all right, I guess,” was all I came up with.
One day, Lydon walked me home from school and we hung back a block or so from Mama. He asked me about the poem we had to memorize, and if I’d chosen one yet. I said no, that I didn’t feel like reading poetry in front of the whole class and he said, “I know what you mean.”
Then he asked if I heard anything about Floyd and I said no. He said Greta Tomshaw had passed him a note and wanted to know what we were up to. He said I looked pretty that day. Then he said his brother and Evelyn Williams were going to get married so they could see each other naked and kiss and touch each other. He talked about it long enough that I got the hint.
“I just don’t think I could,” I said. I was quiet for a long time and I scrunched my mouth from one side to the other and kicked some rocks out of my path. It took about a minute of that before he kicked a water pump and cut through the Neckers’ yard.
I had to run to catch up with Mama.
Mama was cleaning the table when the radioman began talking, loud and rushed. “On the eighteenth day of the Floyd Collins crisis, we have an update,” he began.
The army men had found a new route after the one caved in, and they had reached Floyd, three days dead. Mama set down the bowl of potatoes on the table and looked at Daddy, who was halfway out the door. He stood there, letting the winter air fill the room.
“Fools,” Mama said in her spiteful voice and crossed herself. “Bickering, arrogant fools.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was a little glad he got to die in private. If he’d been rescued, what would he say to the crowd? To the man selling sandwiches?
Daddy pulled out a chair and Mama shut the door. He slumped like someone let the air of his chest.
“I can’t believe it,” Daddy said. He held his head in his hands. Mama stood behind him and put her worn hands on his shoulders. I looked away because I didn’t want to see him cry.
“I just can’t believe it,” he said. I could. And I was only surprised that I wasn’t surprised.
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