A Real Hunger Game
Posted: May 25, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: corporate schools, Hunger Games, job interviews, teachers 3 Comments »
I read The Hunger Games several years ago when a member of my writer’s group, Carolyn Marsden, said, “Read it.” Carolyn writes very sophisticated and evocative YA novels and tracks hot spots in the publishing world like a blue tick hound after possum in a bayou. So we all read The Hunger Games and I thought, “Okay, this is the cri de Coeur of the young, the perennial outrage at whatever system happens to be in control.” In this case it’s the diseased corporate “government” currently in power. All systems relentlessly crush autonomy, even spirit. It isn’t necessary to be young to recognize and hate that, although railing against it is the province of the young. The rest of us realized long ago that survival lies in a combination of deft camouflage and feigned disinterest while quietly sabotaging what we can.
Recently I also saw The Hunger Games movie just because everybody else did. It was so faithful to the book that there was nothing to complain about and I shelved the whole Hunger Game thing with “interesting but fleeting literary/cultural artifacts.” It didn’t touch me, I thought. But that was all about to change.
It was all about to change because at some point in there it dawned on me that I’m not 
dead. I’d always assumed I would be by now, gone in a flaming car crash with Bach blasting from the radio a la Anthony Perkins in Phaedra. I really, honestly thought some dramatic event with a terrific soundtrack would occur whenever it was supposed to, transporting me to whatever comes next. My only concern has always been the music. But a few months into The Hunger Games frenzy, I realized that my Bach-filled car crash not only hadn’t happened but probably wouldn’t. I mean, surely it would have happened by now, right? Rats. If I was going to live indefinitely I was going to need a job. Enter The Hunger Games.
I applied for two famously underpaid adjunct professor-type positions and was hired by one. When the second scheduled its “interview and candidate assessment” I already knew I couldn’t take the job even if they offered it. I was employed elsewhere with the job that is now devouring my life so that I have no time to write. But I’d already provided enough documentation for Job 2 to qualify for top secret clearance with the CIA, an effort I saw no point in wasting. I’d go to their assessment. Why not? Facing an unanticipated future in which the price of haircuts and Kettle Corn will rise inexorably, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have Job 2 as a backup for later. So I dressed up in my famously underpaid adjunct professor costume (turtleneck, long skirt, artsy scarf and earrings) and went, although I wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t care, and from that perspective I would be able to see what no one else could. I would see that I had become a participant in a hunger game.
And here I have to admit that I have been warned not to write about this. Friends have hinted at dire consequences. “Even if you don’t use the name, everybody will know what you’re talking about. What if ‘they’ see your blog? They’re huge. They can hurt you professionally!” “Oh for God’s sake, this isn’t a spy novel,” I thought. At least it isn’t a novel. It’s reality. And who’s going to rat me out? Nobody likely to read my blog, for sure!
So I showed up in a room of sixty or seventy people dressed in interview drag, all warily sipping water from plastic bottles. I was, I think, the third oldest candidate there, depending on the real age of the guy in dyed hair, pancake makeup and a bright peacock blue dress shirt that strobed in the neon overhead lights. I remembered Clue and named him Mr. Peacock (in the large corporate cafeteria, with the plastic water bottle). He was the only interesting character in sight and I hoped he’d get a job so he could stop living in his van in beach parking lots. There were mountains of shrink-wrapped sandwiches, tiny bags of potato chips, soft-baked cookies, water, soda, coffee and tea. It was going to be a long night.
Everybody had to stand and introduce themselves, a nightmare of pointless discomfort. We were there to destroy each other, not to socialize. In a room full of out-of-work college instructors during an economic recession, the twin odors of desperation and boredom snaked amid scents of tuna salad and Earl Grey tea. Teachers are not skilled in peer combat and are thus incapable of masking the reluctant but inevitable homicidal ideation that is natural among primates in competition for scarce resources. As each person stood to fake warmly intelligent quips about their fascination with stateless protocols in web design or a breakthrough in the teaching of English As An Alternative Language, over sixty others smiled brightly while their eyes beamed murderous hope that the speaker would collapse and die on the spot, freeing a job. It was then that I realized what was going on. We were all contestants in a hunger game!
But I wasn’t going to play Katniss because the survival of no fragile little sister, depressive mother or entire starving village awaited my triumph. Disengaged, I could not be killed. I was going to be the Participant Observer/Stealth Investigative Journalist. It’s a fun mindset and I was ready for the first Game.
It was The Teaching Demo. Imagine an empty corporate classroom at dusk. It’s chilly and the politically correct compact fluorescent lights have just been turned on and are still dim, casting the room in insecure shadows. At a round table in the back, the shadows hover around three women in those little primary-color business suits with fitted jackets that button all the way up and have a wool ruffle at the neck. These are the judges of the first game, representatives of the corporation, holding checklists on clipboards. As they tell the aggregate four of us to begin, I am aware that something’s wrong.
In The Hunger Games, the corporate functionaries are decadent, dressed in bizarre haute couture. They are a Grand Guignol cast swilling moss green, arugula-flavored vodka between agonizing murders displayed on big screens. But our judges are not refugees from antique European drama; not one wears theatrical mascara or harlequin gloves. There is no flavored vodka. There is only the chill, the weak light and a pervasive exhaustion animated by a soundless whine I recognize as fear. The candidates are afraid, but so are the judges. Their eyes are flat as dying ponds and I keep thinking, “This isn’t right; they’re supposed to be shallow and gleeful and evil, but they’re not. They’re just regular people, half dead in a cold grey space full of shadows.”
I did my demo (Framing in Expository Writing – yawn) with faked gusto to a room of slivery unease. The other candidates did theirs (Prepositional Phrases, How To Fill Out a Job Application, and Avoiding Plagiarism). The judges scratched things on their checklists and told us to go back to “home room” and wait for the next “assessment activity.” We didn’t talk as we walked back, sworn enemies in a fight to the death. We wondered which of us had just died.
To Be Continued…
Bo Bradley
Posted: February 19, 2012 Filed under: writing | Tags: bipolar, psychiatry, stigma 9 Comments »Serendipitously, the day I finally dived in to promoting my first book, Child of Silence (FREE for one more day, Sunday, Feb. 19, for your Kindle or Kindle app, click here ) I received a copy of Mystery Scene Magazine in which there’s a reprise of an interview we did five years ago. It’s primarily about the Bo Bradley Mystery Series, and reading it made me wonder how much has changed.
Bo’s job as a child abuse investigator (a job I once held) is brutal, but it pales in comparison to her struggle with a psychiatric disorder (a struggle also of my family member) and its associated stigma. The Bo Bradley novels were meant to diminish that stigma by helping readers understand and identify with a character who actually has one of the three major psychiatric disorders – schizophrenia, clinical depression and manic depression. Bo lives with manic depression, or bipolar disorder. She usually takes her meds (but not always) and battles the bureaucratic system for which she works and an uber-bureaucratic supervisor, to save children while incessantly watching herself for the every-threatening symptoms that can make her life a mess.
At the time, popular fiction was rife with ghastly misrepresentations of psychiatric illnesses and indeed anything connected to psychiatry, including psychiatrists! There were countless “escaped lunatics, psycho killers and deranged madmen” stalking the pages of thrillers, and absent those, the bloodthirsty killer was not infrequently a demonic psychiatrist (in tweed and a Freudian goatee). Terms like “crazy, insane, schizo and loony” were lavishly used in lieu of any character development whatever. People who did bad stuff like plotting complex serial murders were always “crazy,” creating in the popular mind the idea that “craziness” always means plotting complex serial murders.
Here’s a story. A friend was approached at a bus stop by an obviously mentally ill man. He said he needed food. She gave him a five dollar bill and nodded toward a MacDonald’s across the street. But he was too lost and confused. He tried to eat the five dollar bill.
This is the man hundreds of mystery thrillers described as heading corporations, traveling the world and romancing svelte models until he cut out their hearts and buried their bodies in pieces near familiar landmarks. An impossible scenario, but readers loved this stuff and internalized its message – “mental illness means irrational violence.”
Except it doesn’t. Mental illness means having a hell of a hard time with everything. Mental illness means having to take meds that make you fat, groggy and out of it. It means confusion, rejection and loneliness. Yes, there’s an occasional event in which someone in a psychotic episode commits a horrible act. But statistically, people with serious psychiatric disorders are vastly more likely to be victims of violent crime than to be perpetrators. Unfortunately, “Homeless Man Found Beaten to Death Under Bridge” doesn’t capture much media attention.
Bo Bradley and her adventures were meant to help change all that, and with many others working to diminish psychiatric stigma, there have been some changes. Psychiatric meds are now advertised on TV along with Viagra and Weight Watchers. Many people are more knowledgeable, comfortable and sympathetic in regard to psychiatric diagnoses and treatment. In Boston not long ago I was walking up Beacon Hill behind two young, professional men. They were talking about a co-worker who was behaving strangely. “I think he’s stopped taking his meds,” one said. No jokes, no sneering censure, just the statement. “Probably,” the other one said. “It can happen. Let’s try to talk to him about it.” They were kind and I had to fight tears. So things are a little better.
But not better enough. The most recent Reader’s Digest had emblazoned on its cover – “Are You Nuts?” The article inside outlined which slightly eccentric behaviors are okay and one behavior that might mean you, um, well, might seek professional help. Not a bad idea, but “Nuts”? There are still countless “Manic Monday Happy Hours,” “schizophrenic” politicians and straitjacket jokes. The stigma’s still around.
And so is Bo Bradley. Her books are alive and well in new ebooks that I hope will continue to diminish the stigma and provide a halfway realistic role model for the thousands whose lives are affected by psychiatric disorders they didn’t choose and cannot escape. I may even write another one.
The Last Bo Bradley Mystery
Posted: December 31, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 11 Comments »
The last Bo Bradley mystery, The Dollmaker’s Daughters, is finally available on Amazon for Kindle! Noting that this little event has not been a walk in the park is like saying Pilgrim’s Progress is the tiniest bit prosaic. To wit: I thought I would never get this book up on Amazon.
I mean, it’s Bo’s last adventure (although two more have been sitting around in outline form for nearly a decade – should I write them?) and I really wanted the whole series to be available. Thousands of people, one of them very close to me, live hard with psychiatric disorders that are grossly misunderstood, distorted and demonized in popular fiction and the media. The “lunatic killer” is a stigmatizing staple; I wrote the Bo Bradley novels to diminish the stigma and I wanted them all out there.
And now they are, thanks to the following people who helped hack a path through the at-times impenetrable briar patch of digital publishing.
Thanks to Andrea Cavallaro, Rights Manager for literary agent Sandra Dijkstra. Andrea spent nearly an entire year chasing down the necessary rights reversion for this book through the tangled maze of French-owned Hachette, which ages ago bought my publisher, Warner Books, and with it the rights to my last three books – The Dollmaker’s Daughters, Blue and The Last Blue Plate Special. (My sainted editor, Sara Ann Freed, had with incredible foresight arranged for the legal rights reversion to the first four to me shortly before her death. At the time I had no idea why she’d done that. Now I know. Thanks, Sara Ann!) (And the last two books, featuring social psychologist Blue McCarron, can never be re-published by me. Those rights are eternally in the hands of Hachette.)
Thanks to Michèle Magnin, who while I paced holes in the carpet, fed the converted manuscript of The Dollmaker’s Daughters through the necessary additional conversions – to Web, through Calibre, to Mobi, then Kindle – countless times over a period of weeks, only to join me in breathtaking realms of despair every time it didn’t work.
Thanks to writer Consuelo Baehr (http://setthiswriterfree.blogspot.com) for immediate responses to anguished middle-of-the-night emails about this, even offering to do it for me! (Consuelo lives on the East Coast, so imagine what time those middle-of-the-night emails from California got there.)
Thanks to my cover artist (DeronLeeAssociates@gmail.com) for several versions culminating in the terrific one you see.
And final thanks to writer Mary Lou Locke (http://mlouisalocke.com) who, on the last day of the year as I sank one more time into the Slough of Publishing Despond, just took the whole bloody, messed-up converted file and fixed it! The guy who did the original conversion from the printed book apparently overlooked several thousand teensy, toxic, imbedded codes that, had they not jammed Amazon’s system, would have turned the text into a sequence of dashes. Lou found the bugs, killed them and briskly sent me an attachment that is now… an eBook!
So on the last day of 2011 the last Bo Bradley tale is launched, completing once again a series I hope will help.
Happy New Year!
Ageism Amid Wheels
Posted: December 3, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ageism, car dealers, revenge 4 Comments »
I hate it when I miss an opportunity for brilliant riposte, and today I missed the opportunity of a lifetime. I didn’t see it coming, but then you never do. The situation was mundane, a car dealership. Boring. I’ve been taking sequential cars to be serviced at this dealership for over twenty years because I buy cars at this dealership. In a quarter-century no one there has been anything but polite and professional, creating a sort of comfortable stupor in which I anticipated no need to be alert, incisive or poised to kill.
The “service engine” light on my impenetrably techie dash had been illuminated by whatever computer system does that sort of thing. So I dutifully made an appointment and took the car in, where I was escorted to a high desk and a young man I will, for obvious reasons, call Flynt.
There was nothing unusual about Flynt, at first. All the service attendants are compelled to dress in business attire, creating the impression that the car dealership is actually a bank into which your money will be siphoned with elegance. I told Flynt about the service light, expecting the usual incomprehensible murmurs about cracked hydraulic power assist hoses or leaky valve housings. Instead, Flynt asked, “You drive in the city?”
We were standing in the middle of a city. I live in the city, a fact documented on Flynt’s computer screen. I was alone and hence could be assumed to have driven my car there.
“Um, I live here,” I said, clueless.
His look was a meld of distaste and outrage. “You drive in traffic?”
It was morning, not my best time, but the accumulation of non-sequiturs was beginning to capture my attention. Flynt’s questions were devoid of sense and yet oddly pointed, reminiscent of a frantic conversation I had in Budapest with a man whose grasp of English perfectly matched my grasp of Hungarian. Neither of us could understand a single word spoken by the other, but there we were. In such circumstances, one makes the effort.
“Yes, there’s traffic,” I said, glancing knowledgably through the plate glass windows at the street, where there was actually no traffic. Flynt regarded me in the way that I imagine the Salem magistrates observed Bridget Bishop before sentencing her to be hanged as a witch. Clearly, agreement as to the existence of traffic in a city was an egregious affront to Flynt. Sensing a no-win impasse, I opted for a courteous exit. Flynt could explore this topic further with somebody else.
“About what time will you be able to call with a report on the car?” I said. “I’ll be available until two.”
A smile that I can only describe as snide curled his upper lip. “When was the last time you drove a stick shift before this one?” he asked.
And that’s when it finally hit me. My car, which looks like every other little black 4-door sedan on the road, has a sports suspension and a stick shift. Among its peers, it’s the racy version, introduced in an attempt to lure a younger demographic to a brand known mainly for its sensible roles in foreign movies. Flynt, I realized, did not approve. I was too old for my car and nonetheless had the audacity to shift gears in a city where there’s traffic. The horror.
But insight does not bring an instant ability at snappy riposte. In its first moments, insight is a kind of shock. Despite the bifocals I’m never going to mature beyond 18, and while I’ve read about ageism along with all the other isms, I never thought about it as a problem for me.
“Um, that would be the Fiat Spider; it was a stick,” I told Flynt, remembering hair-raising drives on the bluff roads above the Mississippi River three decades in the past. The first thing that comes to my mind is always just the truth. “Please have the service manager call before two.”
My ride was there and I left. Later the service manager called and exhaustively explained something or other about a glitch in fuel line pressure. They had the part; the car would be ready tomorrow. Fine. But Flynt’s barely suppressed sneer followed me like the scent of skunk that hangs around for hours after the striped one has waddled away to sleep under somebody’s garage. I don’t mind insults, bigotry and mindless bias as long as I know they’re insults, bigotry and mindless bias. If I know, I can respond. I like a good fight. But being blindsided? Unacceptable.
So tomorrow when I go to pick up the car …
Me: Hey, Flynt, how about this city traffic! Brutal, huh?
Flynt: What?
Me: Yeah, traffic, like you said. I rode my old man’s hog up to the detention center and couldn’t believe the traffic.
Flynt: You rode a motorcycle? Come on. Who do you think you’re kidding? Where’s your helmet?
Me: Left it with the hog. He gets released today, y’know? Needs his wheels. So I walked on over here to get the car.
Flynt: But that’s five miles!
Me: Beats driving in this traffic, right? Hey, listen, I love chatting about traffic, but I have to pick up the truck in fifteen minutes. Load of pea gravel and nitroglycerin. Has to be at a mine in Lump Gulch by tomorrow afternoon. Is my car ready?
Flynt: Lump Gulch?
Me: It’s in Montana. My car?
Flynt: Your husband’s in jail, but you’re getting a truck he has to drive a thousand miles to Montana the minute he gets out?
Me: What husband? And Wolf’s no trucker, trust me. He’s the sous chef at Chez Bastille. And the truck’s mine. A classic Benz flatnose I got in Bratislava the day after the curtain went down. Fifteen gears, two splitters and a butterfly thumb I salvaged from a wrecked Peterbilt in Nome. Sweet. I’ll swing by and show you my rig when I get back from Lump Gulch, let you take it for a spin.
Flynt: No, that’s all right. Here’s your paperwork and we appreciate your business.
Me: Hey, an automotive guy like you! No way you’d pass up a chance to mesh all those gears, and in city traffic, too. I’ll be by day after tomorrow.
Flynt: No, really, fifteen gears? I don’t drive trucks. You pay at the cashier’s counter.
Me: Gee, you think I can walk all the way over there without assistance? It’s at least five yards.
Flynt: What in hell is a butterfly thumb?
Me: You’ll never know, baby. You’ll just never know.
Zombies
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: writing | Tags: Amanda Hocking, correct grammar, the teachers' lounge, Valium, zombie crawls, zombies 4 Comments »
Since writing about my vampire I’ve been troubled by an awareness of my almost total disinterest in zombies. Frankly, I just didn’t get the zombie thing. Dead bodies running around eating the brains of the living. Whaaat? Dead bodies don’t need to eat anything; they’re dead. Obviously zombies are an allegory for something or other, but what? However, yesterday I saw the (filtered, greenish) light. I am a zombie!
Admittedly, this revelation may have been influenced by my having to take a Valium prior to having a long titanium screw drilled into my skull. I don’t do well with drugs and never mess with them, but the dentist insisted, and I wound up with one uncontrollably drooping eyelid and vastly diminished cognitive skills as I stumbled into his office. In a few months the titanium screw will anchor a new, bionic front tooth neither moth nor rust may corrupt. In the meantime I look like I probably run a still down in the holler and never go anywhere without an old 12-guage shotgun and a mongrel dog named “Stump,” who will kill on command. But a side-effect of the unaccustomed drugginess is, perhaps, this sudden onslaught of zombie-comprehension.
What happened was that in an attempt to stop running into walls, I sat at my computer to read Publisher’s Weekly. Before me was article about Amanda Hocking’s zombie novels being made into comics. Hocking made a fortune with her self-published YA zombie, paranormal and fantasy novels on Amazon, then contracted with a traditional publisher for an additional $2 million advance, and now is doing comics. And there are hundreds of other YA books and movies about zombies, all selling like gold in a recession, as well as countless planned and spontaneous zombie crawls wherein scads of people in cadaver stage makeup stumble through the streets of major cities. “YA” means “Young Adult,” a category that extends, depending on the maturity of the reader, from early adolescence to somewhere in the thirties. I stared groggily at a photo of Amanda Hocking, who is now 27 and a multi-millionaire. I thought, “Gee. Shave off seven years and she could be my granddaughter!” And that’s when it hit me.
We are the zombies, the walking dead from another time, chomping away at a
The Teachers' Lounge?
new, uber-wired consciousness in the young that sees no point in correct spelling, grammar or deductive reasoning. Or in the Protestant Work Ethic, traditional marriage and old-time religion. I’m with them on those last three, but as a former English teacher (and nobody is ever really a “former” English teacher), I am a zombie! Lurching through a world in which infinitives are routinely split (“to boldly go…”), I feel pain as each sequential gaffe opens suppurating wounds on my zombie avatar. That mindless, glazed rage in my bloodshot eyes (one of which hangs by the optic nerve from its socket) is directed at phrases such as, “Him and me went…, “ or “Your so stupid.” A failure of agreement between subject and verb is sufficient to drag my decomposing zombie self from its moldering grave. Incorrect pronoun referents (“Each of the dancers wore their dashing fedora.”) animate my zombie shuffle. My red pen is a slavering maw. It must chew and devour every egregious affront on the English language even though I know perfectly well that languages are fluid, alive and prone to change. I don’t care; correct English matters, and that’s what makes me a zombie.
The redeeming factor here, however, is a peculiar fondness inherent in the zombie crawls of the young. They love zombies, love to dress in our rotting rags and mime our stiff, dead-limbed shuffle as they gather on city streets to gnaw severed body parts. We are the past and our incessant chewing at their brains about grammar and responsibility and the value in knowing anything outside the present moment is incredibly annoying, sometimes scary. So they write lots of books in which armies of the living dead are ultimately vanquished (as indeed we will ultimately be), leaving an ill-defined, zombie-free landscape of, from my perspective, really bad English. Still, it’s nice to be noticed, even liked despite our unspeakable appetites, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I can’t wait to be invited to a zombie crawl. I won’t even need a costume!
My Vampire
Posted: October 4, 2011 Filed under: writing | Tags: Louisiana, St. Francisville, vampire 1 Comment »
Graveyard, St. Francisville, LA
Louisiana is strange but deliciously atmospheric, what with its mind-altering heat, ghostly Spanish moss and ominous tombstones blooming in lichen. That so many vampire novels are set there is not surprising. What self-respecting vampire would choose to hang out in, say, Oklahoma? So when a friend and I, in an unaccustomed fit of pragmatism, decided to write a vampire novel, Oklahoma did not occur to us as a setting. It had to be Louisiana, a choice seething with convenience since my co-author lives there. Plus I’d already written a serialized short story for Lands’ End (“The Hollering Tree”) that was set there. “Why not?” we said, and then spent weeks writing those necessary character histories 95% of which never make it into the book. I was thrilled, because, frankly, I love vampires and I get to write the vampire character! Joy.
I mean I love real vampires, not the current avalanche of sweetly fanged teenage-boy vamps – mystical, doe-eyed vegetarians who’ve waited centuries to find the right girl with whom to thwart werewolves and thereby establish world peace. No, my vamp has his roots in those Tales from the Crypt comics I was forbidden to read as a child, although my cousin Ralph was not. Ralph had a vast collection of them in the attic playroom where his sister Rosalyn and I played trampoline on an old mattress until we got tired of jumping and settled in to read. I devoured Tales from the Crypt up there, never missing an issue while my mother drank coffee below, oblivious. And even now among the Halloween decorations just pulled from the shed is an illuminated crypt-keeper who will take his place tonight atop a bookcase in the living room. Some childhood enthusiasms, mercifully, do not fade.
But on to research and the framing of a halfway coherent theory of vampirism.
More graveyard, St. Francisville, LA
I could give a three-day symposium by now on the theories churning out of various academic contexts (psychological, theological, medical, sociological, political, blahblah…) to account for the current obsession with vampires, except that the current obsession isn’t mine. Yes, we’re in a huge paradigm shift considerably more comprehensive than the last paradigm shift (the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Era, all that), in which there was a resurgence of interest in vampires. Clearly, there is a documentable correlation between paradigm shifts and vampires. Change terrifies many people, creating a need for something fictionally concrete through which to channel all that free-floating terror. Vampires work well, apparently.
However, by now “change” is hardly a source of terror for me. Who could live this long and not notice that it’s, basically, endemic? I remember my childhood fondly because everybody remembers their childhoods fondly, but I love being able to find obscure information on the Net at 3:00 a.m. and have no desire to go back. So I can’t mine some subconscious fear of change for vampire material; I like change. What I can mine is – voilà! – original data. Enter The 
Book that I must have – Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures and Fancies from Transylvania (1888), widely believed to have inspired Bram Stoker’s penning of Dracula. I’ve read fragments of this work available on the Internet, and now list Emily Gerard among those whose style and erudition are so charming and compelling as to make of her a friend. She was a marvelous writer with a biting wit, and she knew her stuff!
There are 127 copies of this out-of-print book available in U.S. libraries, five of these copies in California. However, the university inter-library loan service at my disposal (and undoubtedly all inter-library loan services) can only access books that are in circulation. The Land Beyond the Forest is 113 years old and thus hardly circulating among the grimy hands of all and sundry, including mine. Two librarians at public and university libraries fought (and still fight) valiantly to get me a copy, but in the meantime it seemed efficient to wallow in the other original source – Louisiana.
The specific vampire image Stoker immortalized has its roots in Eastern Europe and nobody loves Prague more than I do, but the contemporary American vampire, thanks to Anne Rice, has its roots in Louisiana. So there I was only weeks ago, recording the creepy choir of frogs and cicadas, snapping photos of tombstones and loving the fact that friends’ now-adult children still call me that soft-spoken “Mizz AYuby.” I plotted my vamp’s grotesque movements in those first hours after his disinterment, the stake driven through his heart during the Civil War now a rotted shred in his bony fingers. A water moccasin and several rodents perished in the frenzy of his hunger, but that was only the beginning. I knew the crypt-keeper applauded my efforts, and I would have stayed longer except that I had to get home in order to fly someplace else. But I got what I needed – atmosphere!
Now the real work begins, even though I still haven’t got hold of The Book. (If worse comes to worst I’ll just break down and buy a reproduction copy of it for an inflated sum.) My vampire, Stéphane Grimaud, isn’t the only character, and we have our hands full with a traditional mystery and love story set in the dark heart of Louisiana’s maximum security prison, Angola. Angola, that was once an obscure plantation on the Mississippi River. Where a vampire driven from New Orleans by his own kind in 1863 was shot and thrown overboard by a riverboat captain, only to crawl from the river to wait out the war amid Angola’s cotton. But a shrewd and courageous old slave saw the vampire for what he was, and… fast-forward to now.
The only problem so far is the title, or lack thereof. We can’t think of one sufficiently evocative, so if anybody has suggestions, please send them on!
Darkness, Silence and a Dearth of Stories
Posted: September 11, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Baton Rouge, blackout, San Diego 3 Comments »From 3:40 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8, to varying times in the wee hours of Sept. 9, four million people, including me, in Southern California and parts of Arizona and Mexico were scrounging around in kitchen drawers looking for candles. A blackout, it was no big deal compared to other, bigger blackouts, tropical storms and wildfires in Texas. Traffic on surface streets was barely moving since the lights weren’t functioning, but people were assiduously polite and careful. Nothing on the car radio but two Mexican stations and the local generator-powered disaster station reassuring the 7th largest city in the country that all disaster-preparedness measures were in place and functional. Although if we were dependent on life-support systems anywhere but in a hospital, we should call a number and somebody would come around with batteries or a generator. Stuck in traffic, I worried about those people trapped in 90-degree-hot apartments in wheelchairs with car-battery-operated lung ventilators, and how the emergency personnel would ever get to them in time without driving on sidewalks. I hoped they would drive on sidewalks.
And apparently they did, because nobody died. In fact, nobody did anything. All news reports the next day, after power was partially restored, indicated that in all of Southern California absolutely nothing happened. Nor was there any evidence of concern that anything untoward would happen. At midnight we went out to sit in a car and listen to the disaster station for updates. We heard the mayor urging parents not to leave candles burning in children’s bedrooms even though the children might demand candles. The mayor was tough, pointing out that being afraid of the dark is preferable to the dangers inherent in candles.
Somebody from the water department then took the mike and calmly mentioned that a couple of sewage-processing plants had crashed and were spilling raw sewage into the water supply in certain areas. Boiling tap water for twenty minutes before drinking was mandatory. Since almost all houses and apartment buildings in SoCal were and are built with electric kitchen appliances, and you can only have gas if you pay to customize your kitchen, I wondered how those with contaminated water were supposed to boil it.
San Diego has many, many high-rise hotels, apartment and office buildings. Hundreds of them. And in every single one, the elevators stopped dead at 3:40 on Thursday afternoon. The lights went out, the air-conditioning off. People were trapped on elevators everywhere, deftly calling 911 on cell phones and then waiting in airless darkness for rescue teams to fight their way through log-jammed traffic. And yet there are no stories.
All businesses immediately closed, colleges shut down, transportation ground to a halt. Cars ran out of gas and were abandoned on streets and freeways. In a city where nobody ever walks, the sidewalks were crowded. But by eight o’clock, when the last of the sun was gone, the place was a ghost town. Nobody on the streets but an occasional car, bright lights trying to penetrate a darkness solid as granite. San Diego sits on a terrain of hills and canyons, and a few solar yard lights could be seen twinkling on nearby hills. But they looked exactly like stars, with that sense of impossible distance and thus, irrelevance.
I knew the darkness was throbbing with stories. How could it be otherwise? Throw ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances. That’s the formula, right? So I was antsy all night, eager to hear about something that had happened. When morning came and with it enough power for radio and tv, and I was officially told that nothing had happened, it was like being slammed into a wall. By a lie.
None of us is unfamiliar with the tsunami of prevarication and informational pablum that oozes through our culture. Public figures and institutions lie incessantly about everything, and enormous numbers of people find it more convenient to accept the lies than to question them. What, after all, is the point, as long as we have some idea about what’s really going on?
Last week, flying from Houston to Baton Rouge on a little Continental commuter jet, I was told, along with the 35 or 40 other passengers, that we would not be able to land in Baton Rouge. A previous flight had experienced “mechanical problems” and was stalled on the airport’s only usable runway. We would have to land in Jackson, Mississippi. Halfway to Jackson, the plane made a graceful turn and we were told that we’d be landing in Lafayette, LA, instead. Okay, whatever, these things happen.
Except that once on the ground in Lafayette, we all got on cell phones and learned that the stalled flight’s “mechanical problem” had involved jammed gear and a crash landing! With no right-side landing gear, the plane had skidded across the runway on the front and left wheels, the (presumably empty) fuselage and the right wing, now in shreds. No one was hurt; the pilot must have known what he or she was doing. But I was imagining what that must have been like, the flight crew repeating those “fasten your set belt low and tight, then lean over and cover your head with your arms” crash instructions, and knowing the plane was actually going to crash. And then that first bump, the spoilers kicking in to hold the plane on the ground as the braking began, followed by the frightening tip to the right, the scream of metal scraping tarmac, a firestorm of sparks and flying rivets. That’s a story. Just imagining it is a story. And diminishing it to a vague and boring “mechanical problem” obliterates the story!
There is an assumption that we are pampered, hysterical children who must be protected from anything that is not Disneyland. In lieu of that assumption, we are venal, litigious whiners who will sue our own furniture for stubbing our toes if we can get a free tv tray out of the deal. We must at all times be reassured that nothing has happened, is happening or ever will happen. That way we will neither engage in earsplitting wails nor file lawsuits. But the unforeseen secondary effect of this near-empty information flow is the creation of a vacuum where once a swarm of stories flourished. I don’t sit around imagining plane crashes, but if the plane before mine on a runway does crash, then by virtue of my proximity to it, I have an intellectual, emotional and spiritual right to an awareness that it has happened. What I do with that awareness is up to me, as long as I don’t infringe on the awarenesses of others.
But that’s not the way it’s done, and so I’ll never hear any of the stories born in my darkened, silent city. Did a bad boy in a bad neighborhood loot a pitch-dark dollar store and come away with a flimsy plastic colander and enough green apple-scented dish soap to last a decade? How about the nun on a sweltering elevator who, rather than faint, pulled off her medieval head covering and never put it back on? Or the two old guys who’d lived in the same apartment building for thirty years without ever seeing each other, realizing as they stood outside in the dark for some air because the windows wouldn’t open, that they’ve both always dreamed of moving to Montana and opening a diner? And that they’re going to! And ah, the boy and girl who’ve spent time together for weeks, texting other people on their cell phones, but now their cell phones are dead and they have no choice but to talk to each other. What did they see, what did they learn?
Those of us old enough to remember phones without dials have a sufficient backlog of stories to survive indefinitely, and can cannibalize them at will to create new ones. But the current practice of obliterating stories in the interest of suffocating reaction to them cannot but produce a peculiar, and monstrously boring, population. If anybody wants to start a campaign demanding our right to stories, let me know. I’ll join!
Joan Ginther, the Most Mysterious Woman in America
Posted: August 30, 2011 Filed under: writing | Tags: Joan Ginther, lottery 2 Comments »
Okay, I love Ga-Ga’s music. And I have enormous respect for Hillary. But rock stars (no matter out outrageously self-promoting) and politicians (no matter how stalwart, savvy and dedicated) are not mysterious. They are the very antithesis of mystery. We know more about them than we ever wanted to know. Their stories, endlessly analyzed, rehashed, doctored, spun and publicized over and over, are drained of mystery, creating a lacuna. A great, silent chasm around which we cluster, yearning for something to think about. Yearning for a puzzle. Enter Joan Ginther.
Underdogs are a staple of American Story. We love underdogs, although only when they transcend firestorms of vicissitude to at last win something or other. Money is a popular thing for underdogs to win because then we can criticize them for not having enough sense to invest it wisely, or for squandering it on home movie theaters and fancy clothes when something or other so desperately needs financial support. A shame, we think. If only I had won.
Joan Ginther, a small-town girl, albeit with a Stanford Ph.D. in math, has won the Lottery four times, raking in a total of 20.4 million dollars. The statistical odds in favor of any individual randomly winning the Lottery four consecutive times are, essentially, beyond possibility. So, in the best card-counting, gangsta math-geek tradition, Joan has beat the system. She’s cracked the algorithm, tracked the distribution pattern and four times bought up the thousands of scratch cards among which only one would win. This is no accident. This is not luck.
After reading Nathaniel Rich’s great article about Joan (although mostly about the Lottery since nobody knows anything about Joan) in Harper’s (Aug. 2011), my first thought was – How could you scrape that gummy coating off 63,000 scratch cards? It would take weeks! But then I wanted to know Joan’s story. And there isn’t one.
When my attention is captured by the shadow of a story the substance of which is deliberately hidden, I am compelled to make up the forbidden story. Probably a writer thing, but doesn’t everybody do that? The inclination to manufacture stories we are not allowed to hear is innate, giving rise to both tabloid journalism and religions, I think.
Joan Ginther
This is the only publicly available photo of Joan Ginther, a native of Bishop, TX (pop, 3,300), who now lives in Las Vegas. In sixty-three years she has made only two recorded statements, both (arguably reasonable) complaints. One was recorded in a USA Today interview conducted, apparently, just after a flight. Joan was unhappy over the abrupt removal by a flight attendant of her unfinished cheese-and-crackers and ice cream sundae. In the other statement she told a reporter from the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she purchased her Las Vegas luxury condo for its view of mountains, not of a monorail later constructed across her view. And that’s it.
Moreover, decades of her life remain to be accounted for. She finished her doctorate in 1976 and then is said to have taught math at various unnamed universities in California for ten years. After that, nothing. Nobody, or at least nobody anybody found to interview, has the slightest idea where she was for over twenty years of her adult life after those ten years. She’s an enigma, an unknown quantity, a (very wealthy) mystery.
But before engaging in wild conjecture, I have to wonder why it is that nobody seems to have done the obvious research. She has a Ph.D. From Stanford. She will have had a doctoral committee, an academic advisor, fellow candidates, none of whom has been interviewed. And what about her dissertation? Did anybody go to Stanford’s library and read it? What if it’s about analyzing algorithms? And what about all these unnamed California universities where she taught for ten years? There are personnel records, students, colleagues to talk to. Yet nobody has.
Joan is no Lady Ga-Ga, no Hillary. She doesn’t photograph well and clearly loathes publicity. But so did Whitey Bulger and that didn’t stop anybody. So I’m left chewing on the idea that unless one is either male or a female icon of seething sexuality and/or political ambition, one isn’t worthy of attention. Even if one has managed to break the Lottery code to the tune of twenty mil. Dumpiness as protective shield. Nobody wants to know about the fat lady. I think this is weird.
Meanwhile, all sorts of commissions are madly investigating her. I imagine men in black with ear-cords following her everywhere except the ladies room, where she’s followed by women in black. Armanied mavens of organized crime send her gigantic floral arrangements daily with invitations to private meetings. If one of them succeeds, the others will watch him sink to the bottom of Lake Mead by sundown of the same day. I imagine that in her mail she receives countless death threats and supplications from people whose dying children long to see Disney World. Among these is a single letter that’s heartbreakingly real, but she doesn’t know which one it is, and the fact keeps her awake nights. That and the fear that somewhere, right now, a highly-paid chemist is mixing the tasteless substance that will wreck her brain and leave her unable to understand basic algebra. The substance will be dusted on airline crackers or hidden in chocolate syrup. In my mind, brilliant, bulky Joan isn’t safe, anywhere.
Or a worst-case scenario, and one that might account for the significant disinterest in her, would have her a gambler. Addicted to those flashing lights and maddening casino sound effects, she loses thousands a day at Blackjack, Red Dog, Pai gow. She’s as obvious as a tractor on the casino floor amid the amphetamine-thin denizens of that world, but they form an ever-shifting and heavily armed wall of protection around her. They’re paid to protect her by the casino owners, not one among whom would fail to cherish a multi-millionaire compulsive gambler. They know if she loses big, all she has to do is win another Lottery. I hope that’s not the right story.
So far, there’s no evidence that Joan’s a criminal. Gaming and lottery laws are murky legal territory, the law scrambling to keep up with a technology that becomes more impenetrable every day. It may turn out that, arguably, she stepped over a legal line somewhere, but her last win was a year ago and nobody’s found that line yet. I prefer to think she’s just smart, a small-town girl with a high IQ, an eccentric who got tired of explaining moot hypotheses and contingency tables to bored adolescents. I prefer to imagine her holed up somewhere for years in the baking Texas heat, painstakingly scribbling mathematical formulae on the wall a la William Faulkner’s storyboard for A Fable until at last she saw how to do it. I want her to revel in the fact that she broke a system thousands have failed to break. I want her to use her winnings well and grow with the opportunities they bring her. And I want to read her story, if anybody ever bothers to write it!
Polio
Posted: August 17, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: polio 8 Comments »
Iron Lungs
Philip Roth is so egregiously sexist that I haven’t read him in years. Thus it was dicey when I saw that his new book, one in a series of small novels, is about polio. The word brought me up short. I am old enough to remember polio before Salk, although I don’t particularly remember it. What I remember is a story. So I read Roth’s book, entitled Nemesis.
The year is 1944, it’s summer and unbearably hot in Newark, New Jersey, Roth’s home town. Bucky Cantor, 4F for impaired vision, is a playground director in a Jewish neighborhood where one by one the boys succumb to the dread disease. Bucky flees to work at an idyllic camp in the Poconos with his girlfriend, but it’s “The Masque of the Red Death” all over again, although reviewers consistently compare the book to Camus’ The Plague. I guess Camus sounds more impressive than Poe.
In any event, Bucky’s life is shattered, not so much by polio as by a retro-macho nice-guyness Roth captures in one sentence – “But there’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy”. The viral epidemic that ambushed an entire generation is only a framework for Bucky’s story, a sort of minor American tragedy. But after closing the book I couldn’t stop thinking about polio, and the story I remember.
Nobody talks about polio any more; it’s been nearly eliminated by the Salk and then Sabin vaccines. But I was
Elvis gets his polio shot
thirteen when I got that first Salk inoculation. The specter of paralysis and death hung over every summer of a long childhood in which I was not really aware of any specters. The perceptions of children are nothing like the perceptions of adults. I knew about infantile paralysis, as it was called then, heard about it on the radio, saw pictures of kids in iron lungs in The Saturday Evening Post. But I was not an adult and couldn’t internalize or project the horror of it.
Instead, I resented not being allowed to go to the Saturday morning movies. Kids could get in for three or four metal milk bottle caps from Nugent’s Dairy, and we wrapped these bottle caps around the spokes of bicycle wheels until Saturday. They made a satisfactory noise, sliding up and down. After weeks went by when terrified parents forbade the dangerous massing of children inside a dark, dirty, pre-air-conditioning movie theater, the rattle of accumulated bottle caps on countless bicycles all over town assumed the nature of a peevish choir. I sulked bitterly over missing my favorite serial, “Kharis the Mummy,” and did not worry about paralysis and death.
We were forbidden to wade barefoot in the flooded streets after storms, and waded anyway. Flooded streets were irresistible despite inevitable cuts and scrapes from the teeming debris of backed-up storm sewers. The specter haunted only adults, the parents whose terrible job is to keep children alive. Oblivious, we sailed plastic bathtub boats in filthy water, falling deliberately, pretending to swim.
So summers went by, each with identical warnings despite which I didn’t get polio and none among my seven cousins got polio. Nobody in my Sunday school class got polio, and nobody in my grade school. None of the neighbor kids with whom I played cowboys and war all day, every day, got polio. And then one did.
I’ll call her Judy Underwood, and she lived a block from me but went to a different school. We were the same age, six or seven, and still forbidden to cross streets alone. We played on our respective blocks, but I knew who she was – a blonde girl who wore dresses all the time, an anomaly when everybody else ran around in bibbed blue jeans. The news that she was in an iron lung in the hospital I could see from my house, and not expected to live through the night, prompted a quiet, primitive response in what I would later understand is a gemeinschaft context. A community rather than a society. A small town. I’ve lived in cities all my adult life, but I revere the gemeinschaft for what I learned that night.
The Old Cathedral
Judy Underwood was Catholic and her family attended an historic church down on the river five blocks away, founded by a Jesuit missionary in 1749. Its proper name is the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, but then and now everybody calls it “The Old Cathedral.” It’s gorgeous in that old Catholic way, rococo, statue-laden and possessed of encrypted bishops and a reliquary containing the teeth of a saint. A vigil for the life of Judy Underwood was somehow immediately organized at the Old Cathedral. There would be people there in shifts, all night, praying for her survival. One of these would be my thoroughly agnostic father.
He took me there in the afternoon and we sat quietly amid flickering candles for a while, then went home. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. I knew why I was there. A kid just like me, a kid I sort of knew, was in a big metal cylinder because she couldn’t breathe. Before morning even the iron lung might not be able to make her breathe, and she would die. I was expected to be present in this magical concentration of intent that it not happen.
In the middle of that night, in the very bowels of the night when children are never awake, I heard my parents get up. There were quiet footsteps, then the door opening and closing. I heard my mother go back to bed, and knew my father had gone to take his turn at the vigil amid the flickering candles.
I saw Judy Underwood a few years ago. She came to a booksigning event a friend and I did together in our home town. She’s a grandmother now, still fashionably dressed, her hair colored and frosted in a way reminiscent of flickering candles, although I didn’t say that to her. I couldn’t say that. Her story is something else entirely that I can never know. Mine is the candles.
And what I learned from polio that night is that you don’t have to believe anything. What you have to do is show up.
The Paragon Carousel
Posted: August 14, 2011 Filed under: writing | Tags: carousels, Gustav Dentzel, The Paragon Carousel Leave a comment »
Gustav Dentzel horse, Paragon Carousel
Carousels are magic; they always have been. The wild glass eyes of beautiful, anatomically impossible horses reflect all the agony or ecstasy you have the courage to perceive. A Wurlitzer wind of eerily familiar music to which no one alive knows the words, can and will, if only briefly, blow fragments of myth behind your eyes and remind you of who you are.
The horses, those eyes, carry the experience forever, but they do not carry it alone. Sometimes menagerie animals leap at their sides, sometimes farm animals, sometimes beasts of fantasy. A flower-bedecked pig, a dragon with gilt scales or a strangely professorial ostrich may also carry human souls around and around in the music. But even in the absence of those support animals, there are strange paintings on the panels, the shields and rounding boards. Mermaids beside George Washington followed by Niagara Falls and then a buxom lady in Victorian underwear holding a banner that says something in German. Heads of jesters, queens and pirates, unicorns, alligators and local celebrities may adorn the shields. And the mirrors, usually oval and rimmed in lights, mathematically spaced along the boards, showing nothing but a photographic blur of color. That would be us, that blur.
Every child should ride a carousel at least once, encoding in her or his still-perceptive brain complex images that may never consciously make “sense,” but will remain when all other images are at last seen as sham. Adults quite responsibly take children to carousels, and adults invariably elect the literary conceit of childhood memory when speaking of carousels. But in truth, carousels are profoundly the realm of souls sufficiently old to understand what they’re about. Watch a carousel late at night, just before closing when the kiddies have all been taken home. There will be a handful of people with mysterious, inward-seeing eyes, circling and circling in the music.
Step on a carousel and risk an enlightenment belonging only to our time, and that, barely. Of the seven thousand carousels that once adorned American parks, fairs and resorts, only three hundred remain. And many of these have been rescued from oblivion by local groups of people who are not young, desperate to preserve a particular magic before it vanishes forever. I am one of those, at least in theory. I love carousels and would probably join a church devoted to their meaning. So I wasn’t surprised when, while writing a novel about grown-up people to whom childhood’s magical perception suddenly returns, I realized that they had to ride a carousel.
It should have been easy, but there’s a quirkiness to this stuff. A quirkiness set in stone. The characters were all in Boston, meeting in a house on Beacon Hill. There’s a carousel on Boston Common; they could have walked to it! But no. I don’t know why that carousel wouldn’t do, but it wouldn’t. I sensed another carousel nearby. A better carousel. It had to be that one, and after hours of research I found it. The Paragon Carousel in Hull, Massachusetts. http://www.paragoncarousel.com/story.html
Dentzel horses and chariot, Paragon Carousel
So I wrote the scene and the book without ever actually seeing the Paragon Carousel. I never do this and it was driving me crazy. What if I got something wrong? (I did.) What if I described an experience impossible there? (I didn’t.) So during this Boston sojourn I enlisted a friend and my son, rented a car and took off for Hull.
It was 92 degrees and a Sunday in July, the worst possible time to drive along an East Coast peninsula so narrow anyone with a good arm can throw a rock from the Atlantic on one side to the bay on the other. Hull was hellishly crowded. In my life I’ve never paid twenty dollars to park, but I was happy to do it, only a half a mile from the carousel that by now was like a siren song. I would have crawled to it over broken crystal and the blowing pages of a Shakespeare First Folio. No 9th century pilgrim dragging herself through most of France and half of Spain to Santiago de Compostela was more determined. Or hotter.
My son immediately dived into the Atlantic, leaving my friend to follow my headlong rush to see a merry-go-round. (How many friends have followed me on these obsessive little journeys over a lifetime? I am humbled to think.) And there it was! The setting for a significant event in my book.
There the two gorgeous Gustav Dentzel horses that drew one of my characters to Hull, the others following, as of course they had to. But I didn’t know about the elaborately carved Dentzel “chariot,” those benches meant for elders and proper Victorian ladies who couldn’t be seen straddling wooden animals. I would have to go back and rewrite that scene. And I knew but failed to include the fact that the Paragon Carousel is enclosed in a building, necessitating a few changes for the moment when it flies!
But everything else was right, and I rode a splendid, prancing horse around and around and around, just as my 
characters did. Ah…!
Later I took photos and met James Hardison, whose workshop is visible through a glass wall in the carousel gift shop. Gepetto’s shop pales in comparison, as James Hardison is a professional restorer of carousel animals. If I could, I would move to Hull tomorrow just to be an apprentice in that workshop! As it is, I can only write about those horses and boards, those panels and shields and faces and mirrors that still hold, if perilously, all the fading magic of Western culture.
