And So It Goes …

Well, after nearly two years of broadcasting from Bat Country (aka Carny Town), it’s time to hang up the spurs and move on to another blog. Beginning now, you may find us at our new address, The Valley of the Ashes. Hope to see you there!

Sweetness and Blood

The Pop Matters Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 list is up and running and I selected Michael Scott Moore’s Sweetness and Blood as my entry. You can read my mini-review here and watch the trailer for Mike’s terrific book below.

Two Trace Stories Revisited for Momentary Relevance

The last few days I have been working on an essay for the Re:Print department of Pop Matters, tentatively titled Ernest Hemingway’s Mystic Communion; the topic, inspired by Terry Mort’s non-fiction work, The Hemingway Patrols, concerned with the celebrated author’s quixotic pursuit of German U-boats off the coastal waters of Cuba during World War II, dabbled briefly in the bright cynosure of the Roman Catholic church for Hemingway and for myself in my youth. From the unedited (and incomplete) essay:

In later years, I was probably the only ten-year-old boy among my peers who regularly watched the Billy Graham Crusades when they were broadcast on television; at the time I did not possess the intellectual tools to separate a fascination with storytelling between religious faith, for that is what first summoned me to religion, so I considered myself a “Born Again” Christian, a shopworn but still effective title in the 1960s and 1970s. (From this position it is easy to understand why Evolutionists consider Creationists a clutch of Biblical literalists who put their trust in “fairy tales”; the Bible, after all, does require the reader to take a tremendous leap of faith, literally and figuratively, in order to believe that the words are unquestionably gospel, no pun intended.)

Later in the essay, I cite a passage from a heavily autobiographical Trace story, Reveal the Narrator, written in June of 2006. Since I have shuttered the doors at both 8763 Wonderland and Carver’s Dog for an indeterminate period of time (meaning the Trace Stories can no longer be read online except in cached form), the reprint of the tale is herewith offered, followed by another adventure and its current relevance.

#############################

REVEAL THE NARRATOR

Trace was once mentoring a young writer who complained that he didn’t know how to harvest from his own life experience in order to write convincing characters.

“Are you available all day today?” Trace asked one morning as he contemplated the young writer’s dilemma.

His schedule was indeed open and free so they met at Trace’s favorite restaurant, Foxy’s in Glendale, for breakfast. When the waiter observed that Trace was walking with the aid of a cane he stepped aside with a majestic sweep of his arm and gave Trace a wide berth.

“Why do you need a cane?” the young man asked when they eased into the red vinyl booth.

“Arthritis in my hip and nerve damage in my left leg. I don’t need the cane so much as I like to have it around in case something goes wrong. I have problems climbing stairs, for instance.”

“Forty-seven seems awfully young to have arthritis that bad.”

“Not just any arthritis. It’s psoriatic arthritis brought on by severe psoriasis.”

“Jeez. When did that come on?”

“A few years ago. The ‘when’ isn’t half as important as the ‘why’.”

Trace ordered his usual dish, corned beef hash and eggs, and his young protege ordered ham and eggs.

“The stress of the writing life brought on the psoriasis,” Trace said as he stirred sugar and cream into his coffee. “But before that I was diagnosed as bi-polar. I try to get by without meds but it’s not always easy.”

“My brother is manic-depressive,” the writer confessed.

“Same difference. Let me ask you a question, Matt.”

“Fire away.” Matt poured steaming water from a steel pot over a bag of herbal tea in a coffee mug.

“What are you afraid of? What scares you the most?”

“You want me to answer that honestly?”

“As honest as you care to be,” Trace said, removing the gloves that obscured his gnarled, arthritic digits. The gloves also served to hide the bright red psoriasis lesions on his hands. Matt, like everyone else, winced when he saw Trace’s hands.

“I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but I’m afraid of the dark,” Matt offered.

“Don’t be embarrassed. A lot of people are afraid of the dark. Do you have a night light at home?”

Matt laughed. “Several. One in each room.”

“I’m afraid of death,” Trace admitted.

“Well, isn’t that sort of a universal fear?”

“Sure it is. In 1972 I was living in Munich, Germany. Thirteen years old. My mom was married to a G.I. who was stationed there fresh out of Vietnam. He worked at the base motor pool and she worked at the base library.”

Trace motioned the waiter for a coffee refill.

“Anyway, my sister and I had to have a baby sitter –”

“You have a sister?”

“She’s dead now.” He sipped his coffee quietly for a moment before continuing. “We had to have a sitter, a German, to help us when we went into town or anywhere off base. Mom hired this girl, Helga, a plump little German woman, unattractive as all hell, around twenty-two years old. Helga, it appeared, was obsessed with death.”

Matt leaned forward on his elbows, engrossed in Trace’s words.

“ Every day – sometimes she skipped a day but most every day for two weeks – Helga took my sister and I to the local funeral home that was located just at the edge of the U.S. military base in Munich. The funeral home had this vast auditorium with glassed-in walls on either side. And beyond the glass walls were the newly-dead laid out in their coffins.”

“Just laid out in the open like that?”

“That’s how they do it in Germany, I guess,” Trace replied. “Viewings for loved ones.”

“Or for anyone walking in off the streets, apparently.”

“Apparently. So, Helga would take Lynn and I by the hand and walk us through the funeral home to look at all the dead laid out in their finest clothes. It was quite an experience and she was totally engrossed.”

“What bothered you about it the most?”

“You ask good questions, Matt. One day there was an older German woman laid out in her coffin in a purple nightgown. It looked like sheer satin; the nightgown, I mean. And I was standing there, a thirteen-year-old boy, with my nose pushed up against the glass and his fly – this fly just landed on her nose. And I remember waiting for something, anything, a twitch of the nose, but nothing. She was really and truly dead and that was the moment I became terrified of death.”

“Jesus, Trace. How long did this go on?”

“The trips to the funeral home? Two weeks. After that I ratted her out to my mother and she fired Helga on the spot after giving her a lecture about what is and isn’t appropriate for children.”

“How old was you sister?”

“Ten.”

“Was she bothered by it, too?”

Trace hiked his shoulders. “Lynn and I rarely got along. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care.” 

After breakfast Trace suggested a trip to the beach and Matt heartily agreed to drive. It was a warm Tuesday afternoon. Trace told Matt to take Sunset Boulevard from Los Feliz all the way to Westwood and from Westwood to cut down to Santa Monica Boulevard to the pier. On the drive from Glendale to Santa Monica, Trace told Matt the story of the entire trajectory of his career, how he used assignments for porn magazines as stepping stones to assignments for mainstream magazines, how he lucked out finding a publisher for his first novel and how that novel failed to produce the kind of success that Trace expected.

“Typical story, really,” Trace said. “If you’re getting into writing for the money, Matt, you’re in the wrong profession.”

Matt parked the car in the public lot on the Santa Monica Pier and they walked to the open-air restaurant at the end of the pier and both men ordered beers.

“The last time I was here was a year ago with —.” He couldn’t speak her name.

“Your wife?”

“My ex-wife. My second ex-wife. The less said about the first one the better, except to say that we produced a pretty cool kid who I rarely get to see.”

Trace sipped his beer pensively.

“I was in a pretty black depression the last time Josephine and I were together. We had been separated for awhile and things were looking good for a reunion and then –” Trace shrugged his shoulders. “I wrote something, a Dan Knight story –”

“I read some of those. They’re very good. Let me guess: Dan Knight is your fictional alter ego.”

“Yup. Well, I wrote a Dan Knight story about Josephine that hurt her very much. I think I meant to hurt her to show her how much I was hurting. See, her father was dying and her mother was helpless so Jo spent the better part of a year up in the Bay Area nursing her dad to his grave while her mother looked on. It put quite a strain on the relationship.”

“That’s too bad.”

“We rarely speak to each other. That’s the real bad part. But there’s an upside: between my first marriage and the marriage to Jo I had a woman in my life, constantly at my side, for fourteen years. Now, as my career continues to hit an upswing, I’ve been a single man for the first time in that long.”

“I’m only twenty-two,” Matt reminded Trace. “I can’t imagine being with a woman for five years, let alone fourteen.”

Trace leaned his six-foot frame on his cane. A sea breeze toyed with his blonde hair. He looked out at the Santa Monica Bay with eyes that Matt noted were a peculiar blue, an intense and electric kind of blue. At that very moment Matt could see, physically at least, why women found Trace so attractive.

“You kind of get used to having someone around. Being alone isn’t always easy, Matt.”

“You date though, right?”

Trace nodded. “I date. Sometimes I date too many women, to fill that void, I think.”

“Anyone special?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I ask?”

“If I told you I would have to kill you.”

Trace took a long swallow of his beer and lit a cigarette.

“Did you know they don’t allow smoking on the beach in Santa Monica?”

“I knew that.”

Trace frowned. “Fucking smoking police everywhere these days.”

It was dusk by the time they hopped into Matt’s Honda Civic for the long drive back to Glendale. The sky to the west was turning a shade of red mixed with soot-black.

“Brush fire,” Trace muttered with all the urgency of a bowl of oatmeal. He lit a cigarette and studied the young writer as he drove. “Did you get any of this?”

“Any of what, Trace?”

“This lesson. I am mentoring you after all, right?”

“Right. Of course. I just –”

Trace frowned. “Mining what’s around you for writing is as simple and easy as betraying your friends.”

A sick look came across the young man’s face.

“You now know my whole life,” Trace said. “Go fucking write something, will you?”

################################

At 2:00 this morning, after polishing the first 1,100 words of the Hemingway essay, I settled into the sofa with reading material, namely the terrific David Ulin-edited anthology, Writing L.A., from my friends at the Library of America. I stumbled upon a bit of flash fiction from Ray Bradbury, circa 1953, titled The Pedestrian, a piece I had never read before, about an L.A. writer in the year 2052 A.D. who enjoys his solitary evening strolls when “the streets are long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country, If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he could imagine himself upon the center of a plain.” Needless to say, his nocturnal pedestrian wanderings attract the attention of the police; as happens to Trace in To Protect and Serve from November 2005:

#############################

The LAPD black-and-white glided to a stop at the curb and the young officer in the passenger seat shot a long, level gaze in Trace’s direction.

Trace shifted the bag of groceries to his left hand, keeping his right hand free to carefully reach for his wallet, as he knew he would be asked to show identification.

“Where are you heading to?” the young officer demanded to know as he stepped out of the car. His left hand rested on the baton strapped to his leather belt with just a hint of malice. With buzz cut blonde hair and cold blue eyes Trace imagined the cop as a German tank commander emerging from his hatch in the African desert.

“I’m heading home,” Trace replied with as little tone as possible.

“Where’s home?”

“Up the street.” Trace fished in his back pocket for his wallet and offered his ID before it was requested. The officer gave thanks with a curt nod of his head and strolled back to the patrol car to call Trace’s CDL information in for outstanding wants and warrants.

“There’s a reason we stopped you,” the blonde officer said after dispatch confirmed that Trace was neither a wanted murderer, rapist, bank robber, pedophile or anything equally unpleasant. The officer was suddenly unfolding a piece of paper in Trace’s face.

“Does this guy look familiar to you?”

Trace was looking at a Xerox of a mug shot of a slate-eyed criminal.

“No. Never saw him in my life.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. What did — “

“He’s someone we’re looking for and I think he kind of looks like you.”

Trace laughed. Actually he tried to laugh because right then he wasn’t feeling very well. He bore absolutely no resemblance to the man in the photocopied mug shot but this German tank commander begged to think otherwise.

“When did you get out?” the cop asked. His cold eyes took in every piece of Trace’s wardrobe one at a time: the baseball cap, faded denim shirt with a ballpoint pen and a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket, black jeans with a fashionable tear in the knee, old tennis shoes.

“Get out of what?”

“Did you get out of prison recently?”

“Ummm – no.”

“Ever been in trouble?”

“Never been caught.” A laugh choked in Trace’s throat. The cop didn’t think that was very funny.

“You have a job?”

“I’m self-employed.”

“Oh really?” He said it as if Trace had admitted to being one of L.A.’s thousands of street beggars. “What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Uh-huh.” Totally unimpressed. He studied the photocopy of the mug shot for a good thirty seconds and then rested his gaze back upon Trace’s face.

“Are you sure this isn’t you?”

“It’s not me.”

“Thank you.”

The young officer stepped back into the cruiser. Trace hit the WALK button and waited to cross the street.

Soon Becomes Now

For the last two months I have been assiduously scribbling notes in a black basic journal for my new novel, intended for mainstream publishers, not the self-publication route. At the moment I write this, my sciatica is throbbing and an infected tooth is announcing its sinister intent so I have taken an extra prescription painkiller with a swallow of Chardonnay to summon the onset of a journey toward a painless train ride into the place where the waking life greets the subconscious life and all manner of happy mayhem ensues.

Lela retired to the bedroom shortly after ten o’clock after we enjoyed American Experience together on PBS. I read a few more pages of Terry Mort’s biography about Hemingway’s life in Cuba during World War II, The Hemingway Patrols, and another chapter of Joseph J. Ellis’s magnificent but troubling American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. 

I’m worried about money, that much we all know. I never fail to announce that neurosis in these pages any opportunity I get. But I cannot seem to get started on the book because I invest my waking hours in the endless — and fruitless, often — pursuit of paying gigs that will provide the nest egg I need to write my novel. But if that were true, the generous contribution from the Authors League Fund a few months back should have provided me with the backboard to rest on while I wrote the novel … instead, I wasted that time looking for support after the ALF funds would be spent and gone (and searching for suitable housing in Los Angeles, only to discover that the “affordable” rental market is a thing of the past).

But in less than two months the calendar will turn to my fifty-second year. I do not labor under the delusion that I will sell a manuscript for millions and hence strike a fatal blow to my financial woes — in point of fact, my fiction is marketed to the lit-fic market, which we know pays notorious pauper’s wages.

But tonight after putting aside Mort’s work on Hemingway and Ellis’s work on Jefferson, drowsing slightly while leaning forward on my knees on the living room sofa while Lela snored softly in the room next to me, I picked up the Bukowski poetry collection, Sifting Through the Madness, for the Word, the Line, the Way, and came across the following bit of wisdom from Hank:

excuses

once again

I hear of somebody who is going to

settle d0wn and

do their work,

painting or writing or whatever,

as soon as they get a better light

installed,

or as soon as they move to a new

city,

or as soon as they come back from the trip they

have been planning,

or as soon as …

it’s simple: they just don’t want

to do it,

otherwise they’d feel a burning

itch from hell

they could not ignore

and “soon”

would quickly turn into

“now.”

Storm Over the Land

No, that header is not a reference to current events but the title of Carl Sandburg’s masterwork, Storm Over the Land, a reworking of his 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.

In the first of a series of articles marking my return to Pop Matters after a long absence, I share some thoughts on Sandburg’s often-poetic work:

Sandburg once wrote that “man is born with rainbows in his heart and you’ll never read him unless you consider rainbows.” It’s some kind of amazing testament that the poet could maintain such unfettered optimism after so thoroughly exploring the evil that men do in the name of political ideology, something to consider as we head into a new year with overheated political rhetoric the order of the day.

I did not write that last graph in the wake of Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson — it was written on January 3. Read Life During Wartime: Carl Sandburg’s Poetry of the Macabre.