SAMPLE SHORT STORY

Anatomy of a Story

by Jack Lehman 

     How much detail should a writer include, what makes dialogue interesting, should there be a twist at the end of a short story? The answer to these questions is that you need to go deeper than these stylistic matters. Back to the underlying reason this is a story that has to be told.

     “I’m not Bill, I’m Roland, his son.”

     “I’m sorry I didn’t realize how much you’ve grown since I last saw you. I’m John, Bill’s uncle. You look a lot like your dad.”

     “He’s around here someplace, doing something for the wedding.”

     “Good, good. I drove in from Wisconsin for this and…well it’s been a while since I’ve seen any member’s of my brother’s, your grandfather’s, family.”

     “You were my grandpa’s brother?”

     “Yes, still am. I mean he’s no longer alive, but I am. I just haven’t seen anyone for a while, being out of town and all, like I said.”

     And I knew that was the case for Bill as well. He lived in Cleveland where he was a fire fighter. Ironically, his was the last family wedding I had attended. My daughter and I had driven to it from Madison, Wisconsin, and stopped off in Ann Arbor on the way. I had gone to graduate school there and she was considering doing her post graduate work at the University of Michigan as well. Now Bill and his wife had been divorced for many years and his two children lived with their mother.

     That was the curious thing about weddings. We go to them to be inspired, to praise everlasting love between a man and a woman. But what about second marriages like this one of my niece I was now attending in the forest preserve of a Chicago suburb on a late Friday afternoon in June? As I was to look at the front row of chairs set up by the gazebo for our side of the family, I could see that most who were sitting there were divorced, separated or the children of parents no longer together. Fortunately most of them had little tasks to perform: take care of the rings, make sure the place cards on the dinner tables inside were correctly assigned, practice a wedding toast or help the bride get dressed.

     I didn’t see Anne anyplace before the ceremony. I guessed she was preparing for a grand entrance. As to the groom, he was anybody’s guess. There were men in suits gathered at various spots throughout the garden. Any one of them would do.

     OK, what attracts me to this subject? Being uncomfortable about a setting in which everyone seems to know one another and have something to do, except me? That, even more than why people join together and split apart, seems to be the answer. Creating a story gives me control over a situation I didn’t have in real life. But now the characters and scenes are free to lead me beyond. I don’t know where. That is what is exciting to both reader and writer, because in fictionalizing the situation, it is possible some deeper truth may emerge. Curiosity and risk become driving forces.

     I thought about the tall gangling boy who had stood before me, wanting to get free.

He looked like Bill, and Bill (when he came around the corner as we were talking) looked like a younger version of me. My own adult children, as well as my deceased older sister’s sons and daughters, had not been invited, and my second-wife and I had been in the midst of a major disagreement. She’d decided not to come.

     Because I wanted to take pictures, I slipped to the side of the chairs and dutifully, after an interminable wait of electronic keyboard music, captured the big entrance, the rising for prayers led by a friend-of-the-groom’s-family minister, and some quick words by an attractive female judge in requisite full-length robe. Then it was time for the exchanging of vows.

     Anne: “I remember the afternoon at the country club meeting Cliff who’d been playing tennis with some of my friends.”

     This was nice. Personal, real.  But then, behind the pianist, through the bushes, I saw the face of someone who probably had not been invited—Anne’s former husband.

     “I realized, here is the man I had been looking for all my life, the man I was meant to be married to.”

     There was a loud crack. Like a gun. But it wasn’t a gun, it was thunder. The sky covered over and the world turned ominously black. The judge hurriedly wrapped up the proceedings. Within minutes the bridal party, attendant family and guests, robed judge, friend-of-the-groom’s-family minister and I were scurrying through the rain like a gaggle of geese toward “The Grove” bungalow-like reception hall where a beef and chicken buffet would be served. The ghost of the former husband—real or imagined—had disappeared.

      Plot has moved forward. The setting mirrors the suppressed inner conflict of the narrator. So what? What’s in this for me? the reader asks. Or for me, I, as writer, also wonder. Why continue. But discovery in a short story is a vertical rather than horizontal thing. We don’t find something new, but rather how elements of the story that didn’t seem to be connected at first, now start to fit together.  

     It was only when I saw the wife of my brother, Ted, and her sister that I suddenly knew. Rita, the sister, was grey, overweight and bent. Talking too much, I could tell even from a distance. I had known her first when we were both sixteen. She had dark eyes and had had black Italian hair she wore in a Bobbie cut. She’d been popular— active in school and church activities—and I, well I was a rather introverted nerd. But that connection wasn’t what struck me. It was that my brother was not there. Often we invoke those who have passed on, as if they were present in some way. Anne had about her father when I went through the reception line and talked to her. But what really surprised me was when Anne’s sister, Sarah, introduced me to her youngest daughter.

     “This is your grandpa’s brother, my uncle. Uncle John.” And then to me, “Oh, I forget she was born after Dad died. She never knew him.”

     There is a wonderful photograph I remember of Ted, his wife and all of all his young children, striding toward the camera, like the Kennedy’s or something. Then he had died. Ten years earlier than even he had expected.

     Suddenly I was my brother returning. A stranger. And life had moved on. 

THE END

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Final Part

 

Many miles to go before I sleep.

 

Some give us birth, some give us children, but it’s gypsy women in the night who adorn our male bruises with tattoos. 

Why I’m Telling You This 

I’ve always thought that organizing and re-organizing books is a pretty good metaphor for life itself. Remember the first time you did it—placing the large picture books on one end and the smaller ones, like Beatrix Potter, on the other. As we grow older we keep only those that still hold a piece of ourselves and add others full of mystery (like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew), adventure (Call of the Wild) and even young romance (and here I have to defer to my wife’s Anne of Green Gables). Words replace pictures as we travel back in time or forward out into space. “Once a reader, always a reader,” proclaims the masthead of a pulp magazine from the ‘20s. 

Then the day comes when we merge our personal collection with that of another. Over the years these books weather moves, suffer damage from mildew in basements or are even lost when we lend some to friends who don’t return them. When that happens we feel it more personally than a missing casserole dish. A book can be replaced, but for sentimental reasons we seldom do it. And perhaps that’s how love is lost, for inevitably the day comes when we must separate what is ours from what is hers (or his), decide what is me and what is, after all, someone else.           

Perhaps you have a book that once belonged to your mother or father. For me it is one called How to Draw Anything. My dad, who was an aspiring painter, prized it and referred to it often. Don’t we secretly hope that someday after we are dead one of our children or one of our friends will hold a book that was part of us and take it home, make it live on in his or her life? But, that’s not why I’m telling you this. There’s more to sharing our stories than books.           

This happened to me twenty years ago. I had been fortunate to have a half- dozen poems published over a period of a year and a half. My nephew who was an adult living in Chicago heard about this and asked me to send him some of my poetry.  I xeroxed a number of poems and sent them off. A month later he wrote that he’d enjoyed them well enough, but that he was very surprised when his mother (my sister) came over one night and spent a couple hours in an easy chair reading them…one in particular. I instantly knew which poem this was.  

When I was about fourteen my sister and her husband were expecting their third child. They had decided to name it “John” if it were a boy.  At that age I took this to mean they were naming the baby after me. The baby was born, right before Christmas. It was a boy. Unfortunately it lived for only a few days, then died.   Everyone gathered at my parents’ home for Christmas Eve. Ordinarily my sister who was sixteen years older than me, would have been in the middle of the celebration, she was very gregarious. That night she didn’t feel like it so she sat in an easy chair in my room as I worked on a model railroad building. I didn’t know what to say. I still wouldn’t; but years later when I wrote a poem called “Autobiography” it was this experience that was one of its central images. And now years later, through writing, my feelings expressed in that poem reached her. No publication in a magazine could possibly compare to that.           

Several years after my nephew’s note, I invited my sister to participate in one of my writing seminars. She had been a journalist and I thought it might get her writing again. When it came to the point where I talk about showing your work to others and trying to get publishing, I thought to myself, Should I include this anecdote I usually told about this autobiographic poem. My sister and I had never discussed her child’s death directly. Well, I decided to go ahead and recount the story.  When I finished all eyes turned to her, they knew she was my sister. She said, “You know, it wasn’t that you didn’t say anything, the trouble was that no one said anything.” I was so happy she had seen that poem. That she knew we did care, even if we couldn’t say it. Later in the year, at another seminar, a woman called out, “My God, I had a baby, named John, who died and no one would talk about it either.”  

We’re all friends,…who just don’t know each other. Sharing our stories is a way in which we do. Thank you for coming tonight and listening to mine. I hope they remind you of some of your own stories that you might otherwise have forgotten. Stories you make your own, that you can tell others. Little scenes with a direction and meaning, at least for you; in which you take risks that test the boundaries of who you are. In some mysterious way stories and poems, yours and mine, help us to understand our world and guide us forward. Perhaps they are, after all, the handouts for a satisfying life that we though we never got.  

Slowly at first, then with gusto 

And remember…

 All you  need  are suds,  suds, suds

are all  you  need. All  you  need  are  suds  (all

together  now). All you need  are suds  (every-

body). All  you need  are suds, suds, suds  are

all you need.”

 

Darkness, then the lights come up on an empty stage. John enters from stage right, bows and waves good-night.   

THE  END

 Encore:

If Poets Did Useful Things 

It’s dark. People need to be places,

yet the Poet Transportation Authority

busses lurch, wild-eyed and empty,

down half-deserted streets, drivers

muttering, “ And miles to go before I

sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 6

Art of Reconciliation

 After my wife left me, and then returned,

I wrote a one-act play about it, which we

performed on a Sunday afternoon at the

local bookstore.  She, as the “repentant

spouse,” me, a “cocky but forgiving god.”

Later that evening, she rammed my car

through the back end of our new garage.

 

So what’s at stake in a story? Ideally you should be able to express the core plot in a sentence or two, in about the same space and style as program listings in TV Guide. If this sounds original, fine; if not, don’t worry. Nothing is original. It’s in the telling and in readers’ reactions that it becomes unique. There are always new readers and readers who weren’t ready for this when they read something similar to it before. But now for the teller and for the listener there has to be something real. As someone once said, “Go for broke. Don’t do this like an exploratory operation; it is life and death surgery.”

 

A Brief History of My Tattoo

 It was, say, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, in my parents’ Upper Peninsula cabin. I had on a tank top and was doing something at the kitchen table with my two young kids. My mother said, “Oh I forgot you had a birthmark on your arm.” This wasn’t very startling, but then she said something that set me wondering for years. “When you were born you had a birthmark on your forehead as well, but we had it removed.” I had never heard this before. Over the next couple of months I looked at my earliest baby pictures and none gave any indication of there being a birthmark on my face. It was one of those surreal moments when you wonder, were babies switched in the hospital? Are these my real parents? I even wrote a poem about it called “The Changeling.” In fairy tales elves exchange one of their young for a more-valued human when no one is watching. The changeling—the elf raised by humans—is always somehow foreign to the environment he grows up in, though he knows no other. I had a niece who, when she was born, had a strawberry birthmark on her brow. It was removed by laser treatment. I have since concluded that my mother in her old age mistakenly attributed this to me.

            Thoughts like these were still in my mind as I entered the tattoo shop in Janesville last year. I had an appointment for a tattoo that would cover the birthmark on my arm.  The parlor itself was a cross between a third world medical clinic and a neon-lit carnival freak show. Dragons, skulls, and snakes (at least drawings of them) lined the walls. This was not a place for the faint of heart, and I was basically a coward. But a coward who was fed up with a large tan birthmark. 

Ever since I was a kid I was razzed with, “What’s that shit on your arm?” I found myself wearing t-shirts when I could have gone shirtless or leaving the towel over my shoulders after showering at the gym. It was a symbol of my difference that in subtle ways caused me to act differently. I was a changeling.  At one point as an adult, I thought I would be like the character, Blind Pig, in The Man with the Golden Arm. Because he couldn’t see he decided he would be a filthy, unkempt mess and contaminate the vision of those who could. I wore tank tops and proudly displayed my birthmark. If I wasn’t perfect, people were going to know that the world they saw wasn’t perfect either. But if at heart I wasn’t an introvert, I certainly wasn’t an extrovert either.  As time passed I realized something had to be done.

 

*                       *                       *

Did I mention that my mother had disowned me, my wife decided to move out, and that the tattoo artist’s name was Holly. The next day, after her remark about my birthmark, my mother and I got into an argument about religion. She told my wife of the time that I was “no child of hers.”  It didn’t mean anything in reality, but coming so soon after her confusion about which baby had a birthmark it was curious.  And just eight months before getting a tattoo, my second wife, Talia, decided life would be simpler if she lived on her own. In fact that’s why I finally concluded, why not get a tattoo. 

            People ask if it was painful. What, sitting for 3 ½ hours perfectly still on a stool and having vibrating needles stabbing into your skin? It’s like being cut with dozens of razor blades at once, but what is difficult to explain is that you’re so anxious it will be botched that you are too petrified to look, much less feel the pain or think about whether or not getting a tattoo is really a good idea. I had gone in for a visit a week earlier and shown this woman the art nouveau design I’d xeroxed out of a library book. She recognized the style of the drawing and seemed genuinely interested in doing the tattoo. She traced my birthmark very carefully and I went home to enlarge the design to its proper size. Now, this afternoon, she was carefully shaving the spot, rubbing it with cleaning alcohol and studying her “canvas” intently.

            Holly transferred the design to my arm and began the arduous task of using the electric tattooing needles to push the ink under the top layer of skin. I didn’t know if I should talk or not. I needed her to want to do a good job, but I didn’t dare disturb her concentration. It turned out that a little conversation was fine.

            She was a single mother of two young children. They lived in a small apartment above the studio. She’d originally done the bookkeeping for the business and later would clean up drawings people wanted for tattoos.  She had studied art in school. She would stop every two or three minutes and carefully pat the spot she was working on with cotton swabs of alcohol. Long streams of blue-green ink were running down my arm. I was afraid to look but comforted by her gentle touch. How right it seemed that a woman was tenderly paying such attention to this mark that had been the source of such lifelong embarrassment. The healing process had begun.

Holly had no tattoos. Her skin was very white, almost translucent in the glare of the room.  Her eyes, red rimmed. She had a direct gaze and pleasant smile, though I noticed one of her gums was discolored over a front tooth. She was slight in stature and wore brown coveralls and disposable sanitary gloves. Her children came down twice.  The second time her eight-year-old son showed me a cartoon strip that he had drawn because his mother told him I was a publisher. The pictures were funny. At that point the mother cleaned off the tattoo—which was almost done—and the boy and his younger sister in unison said, “Wow!”

            My arm was so numb and red you could no longer see the birthmark through the design of the tattoo. She carefully put some ointment on it and wrapped it with strips of gauze. I paid her $350 with a $20 tip for her kids and stepped out into the now cool night air. I nearly passed out. I drove a mile then pulled over into a restaurant for a hamburger and fries. There was a tremendous sense of relief. I had done something that I dared myself to do. But besides the throbbing pain, the intensity of the last four hours and a fear that this was a mistake that would mark me for the rest of my life made me physically sick and mentally disoriented. And, of course, there was the anxiety over what my wife (now having returned to our marriage) would think. She was working in Madison that evening preparing a new restaurant, where she was a waitress, for their grand opening. I did make it home and into bed. Talia arrived an hour later. The unrolling of the gauze was like a scene in a B-movie in which the hero undergoes plastic surgery and holds a mirror in front of him as the doctor unwraps bandages to reveal his new face. I think she was relieved by what she saw. She knew I was going to get a tattoo but I had not shown her the design. I’m sure she feared it would be a cartoon bunny (my nickname).

            But the climax came two days later at the opening celebration of the Clay Market Café in Madison (this was it’s real name, not “The Quill Driver”). It was crowded and festive. As I’ve said already, Talia was one of the hosts that night. I had told her I would wait until she was done and we could go out somewhere else for a bite of dinner. Eventually the hors d’oeuvres were gone and customers thinned. Then it was only staff and one or two tables of hangers-on. Talia had told the others about my tattoo and one of her friends came over and asked if she could see it. Since it would involve taking off my shirt, I didn’t think it was appropriate and said, “No.” But one of the waiters said to the friend, “I’ll show you my tattoo,” and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a little design. The new maitre d’ said, “Take a look at mine,” unbuttoned his shirt and wiggled out of a sleeve to reveal some small grapes and grape leaves. By then a small circle of the staff had gathered and I said, “Well if everyone is showing their tattoos, I’ll show mine.” Remember, I am the person who for fifty-eight years had done everything possible to avoid showing the top of his arm to anyone. I unbuttoned my black shirt, twisted my left arm free of the sleeve and (there was no longer any gauze bandage) moved directly under the light.

 

John slowly begins to roll up his sleeve.

 

            There it was, gleaming under a fresh application of skim cream. The new bluish ink ten times darker than any of the other tattoos. The art nouveau design of a large flowing medieval plant like a knight’s emblem, bold, proud, ornate—yet stunningly simple—positively glowed from my arm.  Was it my imagination or were people staring in awe. And was I mistaken or was that a new glint in my wife’s eye as she silently clapped her hands.

            The transformation was complete. I’m sure people at the gym think I’m vain when they catch me glancing at the tattoo in a mirror. It’s not that. I’m just delightfully amazed. If you look carefully you can still see the birthmark against which the single-color pattern is silhouetted. I like that. There was nothing wrong with having a birthmark; it just needed a proper frame.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 5

Rewriting Chapter One

In the first chapter of my beloved

wife’s semi-fictionalized account

of our lives two characters with

soap opera names, Gray Becket

and Sylvia Caldwell, meet through

a personals ad.  He entices her

with poetry and gifts only a woman

could  think of for a  man to give.

My wife’s friends love it, and me.

 

However, after my slight flirtation

with a female friend, she rewrites

the chapter. Now the first person

narrator finds her way despite

the insensitive nature of the male

sex. My spouse’s peers cheer

the work’s new  fierceness and

with her pray all women may be

delivered from evil (such as me).

 

Time passes…and most of that

seems less important somehow.

In the new Chapter One (which I

barely am  allowed  to see) she

turns to God. Men–even women

who are complete strangers soon

agree–are superfluous; without

them life, as well as writing, flows

just so much more (well) easily.

 

But what about Gray Becket and

Sylvia Caldwell? Like a TV show

that switches from one time slot

to another they take up residence

in my verse. She, eyes lowered,

dreams of unrequited love while

sipping café latte as he, lost in his

own imagined world, churns out

enough poems to last an eternity.

 

 For a couple winter months my wife and I did something pretty interesting. Each night at six o’clock we would sit down with a couple glasses of wine and write for twenty minutes in our journals. After we were done we took turns reading what we’d produced to each other. I named this “co-journaling.” Here are three of my writings from consecutive nights. I titled them…

 

My Ideal Woman

 #1

                In the movie, The Heartbreak Kid, the central character marries a folksy twenty-something Jewish woman and they go to Miami for their honeymoon.  She gets a terrible sunburn the first day and while she’s confined to her hotel room for a few days, he is smitten by the young Cybil Shepherd (this was twenty-five or thirty years ago).  She is the ideal white American Protestant male’s dream woman.  He eventually leaves his wife, doggedly pursues Cybil and at the end marries her in a refined ceremony that is in great contrast to the ethnic celebration of his first marriage that began the movie.

            Now I always thought that this premise was wrong. How could someone fall in love with one person and really want just the opposite? But I have wondered about something else. What if a man, for example, fell in love with a woman because she looked a certain way, had a particular manner and there were pleasant dynamics between them and then met another woman who had all the same characteristics but to an even greater degree. There would be a dilemma!  He would love the new person, not because she was different but because she was even more of what he desired. That may seem improbable but I can tell you from my own experience, it is possible. You say, well perhaps someone could be taller, more slender, have a better figure, but her personality would be different or she would be less fun to be with, right?

            Last week at a bookstore-reading a female science fiction writer, Joan Vinge, claimed she had written her latest book because she fell in love with the male character. That got me thinking about Sylvia Caldwell, the character who is my wife in her semi-fictional autobiography (Gray Becket is the man impersonating me). Now he is of little interest to me—I get enough of myself as it is. But Sylvia is another matter. She is like my wife, but perhaps a little taller and more slender; she has all my wife’s personality traits but I only see Sylvia on her good days. And the sex? Well everyone knows that reality can’t compare with fantasy.  There is only one thing that troubles me.  What if these two should find out about each other, or even worse, what if they should meet. Perhaps they will.

 #2

           “And try to make it so there isn’t that ‘glick, glick, glick,’ noise when you shift,” Talia said as we pulled into the downtown area. She had already told me where to exit and where to park and now was back to harping on me about the way I drove.

            “I’ll let you off right in front,” I said, “Then park the car.”  But please shut up, I was thinking, please dear God, a moment of peace and quiet.

            We were going to a grand opening of a new, overpriced Madison restaurant called (give me a break) “The Quill Driver.”  My wife, Talia, was one of the wait staff, but tonight’s event was being catered, so her function was to be hostess–greeting and conversing with invited customers from the restaurant’s old location while I…(and I smiled at this as I left the car down the block and walked to the new establishment), …while I…would sit in a corner, drink champagne and scarf down free hors d’oeuvres.

            As it turned out, though, we were a little late, the skimpy bits of food were already almost all gone.  Wow, I thought, there must have been a mob waiting at the door who waged a major attack on the free d’oeuvres as soon as they opened and it doesn’t look like any reinforcements are on the way.  “Oh well,” I sighed and sat down at a back table after accepting a glass of champagne offered by one of his wife’s colleagues.

            There Talia was, her hand on the arm of the no-chin owner Rodney, talking to one customer while she was smiling at another.  I had to admit, she did look good. There was an animated quality about her that was infectious and appealing, at least from a distance.  I was hunched over my glass of champagne and thought, I should really sit up straight, when I heard a voice like butterfly wings at his ear. “Why John,” the female’s well-modulated tones exclaimed, “what a joy it is to see you here.”

            I turned (while straightening up slightly and pulling in my stomach) to see alone at the table next to me (why hadn’t I noticed her when I sat down) a stunningly attractive woman, about the same age and height as his wife, but with hair…, well hair that looked like the woman’s pictured on a hair coloring box.  My God, I thought, it’s Sylvia Caldwell.

 #3

 “Won’t you join me,” she purred.

            I was sitting next to her, drink in hand, before she finished the sentence.  Good Lord, is she here alone, I thought, quickly searching the restaurant to see exactly where my wife might be.

            As if in answer to my unasked question she sighed, “I came with Gray Beckett, that other white-haired gentleman in a black shirt, talking to Rodney over there.”

            Shit, I thought.  But turning my head I could see the direction in which she was looking. There was Rodney and that pretentious, smug Gray Beckett standing next to him.  Ah, well.  I was envious.  What was the big deal with this guy anyway?  So much for Sylvia Caldwell, I thought, then Rodney, in the midst of pointing something out on the wall across the room, put his hand suggestively on Beckett’s shoulder. “What the hell,” I murmured to myself, as I remembered Beckett was a designer. “Maybe they’re gay!”

            “Haven’t they done a nice job decorating the restaurant?”  Sylvia said.

            “Huh?” I answered, turning back to her.

            “And don’t you just love the name, ‘The Quill Driver.’ It’s an old fashioned slang term for writer.”

            “Why, yes,” I said and turned my head again, this time to make a pretend cough so she wouldn’t notice me rolling my eyes. “Do you like writers?” I managed to ask (hoping that since I was one, the answer would be “yes.”). “I mean, what’s your favorite book?” I continued, trying not to be quite so obvious.

            Now, because there was this striking resemblance to my wife, I braced myself for an answer of The DaVinci Code, Conversations with God or Jaguar Woman.

            “Why,” Sylvia smiled warmly, “it’s your poetry book, Dogs Dream of Running. I can’t tell you how often I’ve read it, John, and each time I find something new and exciting in it.”

            I was melting at her feet; drool was running from my mouth and my privates were playing tom-tom. “Why thank you,” I uttered, “how kind of you to say that.”

            What I wanted to say was that I was madly in love with her. I looked at her face beaming at me and wanted to sweep her into my arms and into my life.  But something held me back… Why? She was perfect. What was the problem? 

            Then it struck me. It was exactly that . . . the fact that she was perfect and I was not. She had everything she wanted in her already perfect world. I saw my wife now, out of the corner of my eye talking to the ugly sister of one of her friends, making her feel welcome and special. I could tell Sylvia of my love but it would mean nothing to her. What I had was a wife who also had needs. Someone whose life I was important to. 

            And here was Talia coming over to our table with a bottle of champagne to refill our glasses. (slowly) Sylvia Caldwell—who, now that I thought about it did seem to resemble a young Cybil Shepherd—was fading into the background.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 4

 

Lost, but making record time.

Perhaps that is too personal for you to become involved with it? But we all have our own imprint of what constitutes home. When I wanted to work this idea into something which in a caring but uncompromising way would be meaningful to somebody else, it became this poem.

 

No One Recognizes Robert

Mitchum in Vietnam

 

“I always thought I could do better.

But  you don’t  get to  do better. If

you’re lucky,  you get to do more.”

—Robert Mitchum, People Weekly

 

I spotted him  wandering among

the rubber trees. Scheduled for

ten a.m., he didn’t show and we—

who had volunteered, from hand-

clearing roads through brush, to

don clean fatigues and have this

guy who hadn’t been in a film in

years help us feel better about

our being there—decided to slip

away for an early lunch.

 

And  there  he  was, by  himself,

looking lost, behind the sagging

mess hall tent—a tough guy, but

neither broad nor tall. I stepped

out, around back, and sauntered

up to say, “Hello,” thinking even

then, wasn’t Vietnam a curious

choice for either of us”? “Why,

so little fanfare?” I asked. He just

slowly shook his head.

 

People died that year. I neither

shot nor saved them. I sweated,

slept, swore and  stank, drinking

bottles of warm beer, pretended

to some  greater cause, but like

Mitchum, we all were lost with

no idea  why  the  fuck  we were

there. That was it. Caked in mud

we dreamt of home, and living to

be here…living to get here.

 

When the  plane  touched  down

our  hearts leapt  and  we began

to cry, only to be met with spit by

protesters who  thought we were

Robert Mitchum-World War Two

GIs. I didn’t hate them, but I do all

of you who went about your lives

who will only know once or twice

what we felt every minute of that

goddamn year.

 

To not play a  banjo all night long

when my son was born, applaud

my daughter, off-Broadway, in a

play or say good-bye to my mom.

Thirty years have passed. Robert

Mitchum, the war and my youth

are forever gone. Except, in that

time I have kept  my sacred vow,

never to salute that stupid Stars

and Stripes again.

 

OK, OK, I’ll admit that some stories belong to other people and that the best ones are those the audience can relate to, but we could go in circles if those were the only two criteria. Let me throw in a third characteristic of a meaningful story: It has direction. Now in the next piece, that’s rather subtle. It’s more of a sense of awareness that things aren’t always what they seem, but in the two following that I push the envelope by envisioning what would happen if the imagined became real.  Plot is a verb. Here’s what I mean.  

 How I Became an Olympic Coach

              It had been more than ten years since I’d participated in my last race. Now here I was at the Badger State Games in Madison. I had just turned 60.

                 I knew I was in trouble as soon as I looked around. First of all, everyone had on real running gear. Second, they were stretching and doing little warm up sprints. I was used to “fun runs” where before the event everybody pretty much just stood there and joked with each other. Another thing, this was a 10 kilometer run and though I had done a bit of running every night for the last week I had never made it up to that distance, or half that distance, or one forth that distance. 

                 I was counting on adrenaline and age. My theory was that the older runners would be, well, older—get tired, need little breaks along the way.

                 I won’t relive the entire drawn-out ordeal. There were a few children and people in wheelchairs who finished after me. But the biggest surprise was when they posted the finishes by age group. It seems that running is something like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The weak and the slow die off. The resultant, over- sixty, sinewy, set-a-good-pace-and-stick-with-it types were proof of the survival of the fittest. And me? Of that group I was dead last. What I needed, I realized at that moment, was a Gueroult. Not a guru, but an Ed Gueroult, the only kid on the high school, freshman cross-country team who was worse than me.

                 I had shown up for a meeting announced on the high school PA system the first week in school, not exactly knowing what cross-country was. It sounded exotic, like we’d be going from New York to San Francisco. I was surprised that there were only a small number who came to this initial gathering.  It was a cozy group and since as a new freshman I didn’t know a single student at this all boy’s school, for the first time, I felt comfortable. It was almost as if, after days of wandering around from class to class lost, I’d found a home. The coach was a graduate student whose glasses made him look like a young Dave Garoway. He talked in generalities but with a lot of enthusiasm. Later we all trudged over to the gym to get lockers. At that point I turned to one of the friendlier looking older classman and asked, “What is it we actually do, when we’re playing cross-country?” He said, “We run our brains out, asshole!”

 *                              *                              *

             I don’t know why Lieutenant Lauren Hagen had such a bad attitude (maybe it was his name “Lauren”). He had been a PE major in college and now every time an athletic intramural event came along he was pegged as coach and organizer.  There did seem to be a lot of these at Fort Riley, which is smack in the middle of Kansas where there was little to do. But isn’t that why he took PE in school?  Anyway he bellyached enough to the battalion commander that when the next athletic activity presented itself—preparing division athletes for the Olympic trials—someone looked through the personnel records and there I was, a high school cross-county star. (I’ll admit I’d exaggerated my lowly running experiences a bit when signing up for the army—maybe I thought I’d be chosen as a messenger to run secret information behind enemy lines.)

                 We had two weeks—Tuesday through Friday afternoons. When I arrived there were athletes all around the track area doing those same little sprints and warm up stretches I was to later see with trepidation at the Badger State Games. For some reason only seven potential Olympians were assigned to me. Well, I had a book on track events under my arm from Lt. Hagen and was ready to go. The first problem was that three of the people hadn’t shown up. I called their units and was told by three different, rude individuals, that each was “not going to be released from duty for such nonsense.” Nonsense? This was the World Olympics. But I supposed they were busy polishing forty-year-old Army vehicles in case we ever fought World War II again.

            The second problem was that Private Polk, a huge black guy sitting in a small two door Chevy, wouldn’t get out of his car. “Let me take a bit of time,” he said in a very slow black voice, “to prepare myself ‘mentally’ for this event.” My third problem was the javelin thrower (boy, you don’t get any more Olympian than that, do you?). He came up to me, javelin at his side and explained that: a) he was an Irish citizen—Why was he in the US Army in Kansas?—and b) he already knew everything he needed to know about javelin throwing, he just wanted the opportunity to practice on his own. Well, I hadn’t found “javelin” in the index at the back of the track book yet, so I agreed that, for the time being, this might be a pretty good idea. The other two listened to my “let’s win a gold medal” pep talk and jogged slowly around the track one time. That was the end of day one, except, Polk did wave at me from his car when practice was over.

              The second day I was pretty much out of the picture. It seems I had failed to register my men “per instructions” and had to beg a sergeant for over an hour to bend the rules. Polk was still sitting in his car like a huge toad stuffed into a jar. The javelin guy was skipping and dancing around in circles without a javelin and there was no sign of the other two team members from the day before. Only Polk was there the next day, smoking away in his Chevy. I begged him to at least get out. He painstakingly explained to me why shot put was not like other events. “You need weight, which I got,” he said to me in what I thought was a condescending tone, “and plenty of rest, which I don’t got.” He continued, “This infantry shit just wears me out.  So, ‘Coach,’ just leave me be.  I’ll come through for you, just you wait and see.” Like I had much choice. But he had called me “coach.”

                 No one showed up Friday. I checked back for practice Tuesday and it was the same story. I missed Polk’s wink and a wave, but decided my coaching career was over. Imagine my surprise a couple of weeks later when I heard that Polk had made the Olympic team. And guess who actually ended up getting an Olympic medal that year? Not Polk. I don’t know what ever happened with him, but the Irish guy with the javelin. I saw him on a television news program one night. He didn’t mention my coaching, but Lt. Hagen did. He told everyone in the battalion newsletter, “See what happens if we get people to contribute in areas where they have talent and ability.” I smiled to myself as I read the article and decided, I’d let the record speak for itself.

 

 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 3

Old Hippie

Where I’ve Lived

It’s like with that poem, “The Handout” we all believe there is some key to life’s mystery just beyond our grasp. We’d like to believe this truth is universal, applicable to everyone equally, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps each of us has our own secret theater in our imagination showing films we create especially to fit only us. 

 

The Movie Version 

In the movie version of my life

everything beneath the surface

makes sense. A porn star plays

my wife, and, oh yes, my black

and white Mustang is fiery red.

 

And while we might not share the same movies, we do all have a need for them, no matter what form they take. And the sharing of them? Ah, the sharing of them…

 

At the Poetry Reading

This is a poem I wrote, have written? No wrote

about a time  when my car and I  were stuck in

an automatic  car  wash—the  kind  where you

drive in between rails and a huge upside down

metal  horseshoe  with rotating  shower heads

passes  back and forth  around your car.  Well,

here’s how it  goes.  This is  the start.  Ready?

“My soul felt  grimy  that  dusty  afternoon.” No,

make it “that dusty summer afternoon,”  “grimy

as the  rocker  panels of my  1997  convertible

coupe. I inserted  quarters,  thirty-two  of them

and drove along the designated tracks when…”

Excuse me,  whoever  has a  cell phone  that’s

ringing, I wonder if you’d turn it off? Thank you.

Where was I?…Hmmm?  No, could that be my

cell phone? How embarrassing.  Hold that car-

wash  image  and we’ll  get to  the suds  in just

a minute. …You know, it might be just as quick

to answer this, I can’t seem to turn the thing off.

“Hello?” It’s my wife. “No, listen, I can’t talk now.

I’m  in the middle  of a  poetry  reading.  I’ll call

you back.Yes, I love you too.” OK, where were

we:“rockerpanelsofmy1997convertiblecoupe…”

Again?  What  does  that woman want?  Just a

second please.  Think suds.  Suds, suds, suds.

Com’on,  everybody, “suds,  suds, suds.”  Very

nice.“I am reading a poem  at a poetry reading

Yes  now.”…Ha, ha, can’t  live  with them, can’t

live without them. I mean cell phones, of course,

not women. “Suddenly I was blinded in a vortex

of  cotton  foam,  a blizzard  of white gobs  that

wouldn’t stop…” …Oh, for godsake, I can’t take

this? …“What, what, what?…I’m on stage right

this minute. No, it’s the one about the car wash.

Well, I like the stupid repetition,…it’s…cathartic.

No, I don’t know. Now good-bye.” She’s asking

about a Beatle’s song. …OK…Let’s finish, shall

we?  “Suds, suds, suds.  Suds, suds, suds.  All

you need are  suds,  all you need are suds.  All

you need are suds,suds, suds are all you need.”

Join in with me, OK?: “Suds, suds, suds.  Suds,

suds, suds.All you need are suds. All you need

are  suds.  All you  need  are suds,  suds, suds

are all  you  need. All  you  need  are  suds  (all

together  now).  All you need  are suds  (every-

body). All  you need  are suds, suds,  suds  are

all you need.”

 

Where I’ve Lived

 On the occasion of my daughter’s moving back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was born, I got to thinking about places where I’d lived. I don’t mean physically as much as imaginatively and emotionally. 

            As a small child in Chicago my favorite room, especially on rainy days, was the attic in my parents’ brown-brick bungalow (at 5923 North Hermitage—the word “hermitage” itself, meaning residence). There were low, slanted rafters and, on the floor, planking that reached almost to the sides of the room…but not quite. Amidst the cardboard boxes and makeshift racks for hanging clothes stored in plastic bags, I’d play with my set of wooden blocks. There were actually three sets of various sizes that once belonged to my older brother and sister. I’d build forts and highways or roofless castles with secret rooms. The “soldiers” and toy cars I had were equally unmatched proportionately. A figure might be four inches tall and a “Matchbox” auto less that one inch long—but it didn’t matter. Sometimes in the summer I’d take the cars and soldiers to play outside in the jungle of my mother’s rose garden—she didn’t seem to care.  But the best place was under the dangling light bulb in the attic on a rainy afternoon where no one saw or could disturb my own little world.

            I didn’t have a room of my own until my sister went off to college. Mostly I slept on the other side of the attic—the finished side—with my brother. Years later I took over the TV room downstairs; he had moved to my college-bound sister’s room next door. I didn’t want a bed to mess up the arrangement of my room—which I fancied to be like the library of a world explorer’s club—so I continued to sleep upstairs, but now with my father in my brother’s old bed.  My father slept up in the attic because he didn’t want to disturb my mother. He’d paint pictures in the basement until late at night and turn in after she was asleep. He also liked to listen to the radio before drifting off, leaving it on all night. I don’t think she particularity appreciated that. I know I didn’t.

            Meanwhile, back at the explorer’s club library (I had some cheap prints of old maps on the wall) I nailed up a dartboard I had purchased with my allowance.  It really looked great and my brother, Ed, and I envisioned playing a nightly game of darts whenever he took a break from his law school studies. I’ll never forget how upset I was when a stray dart stuck in the knotty pine wall the first time after missing the target. I thought, “Well maybe I can fill the hole and stain it and no one will know the difference.” About three weeks later there were at least 2,000 holes in the wall, in the upholstered chair under the dartboard, in my dresser next to it, even in the frame of an old mirror I had on top of the dresser. The room was a dart-disaster. 

            But here’s the best part. My brother, at times, could be somewhat mean-spirited in word and deed. He liked to spoil a birthday by telling me beforehand what my parents had bought me as a surprise, or he’d say things like, “Dad loves me, he hates you.” Well one day he made me very angry about something.  I was fuming in my room wildly throwing darts when I noticed that I could unscrew the metal tip from the front of the plastic dart.         

            A few seconds later I burst into his room, slamming the door open against the wall. He was seated in an overstuffed easy chair, smoking a pipe, and had a board balanced across the arms of the chair with all his law books and papers on it. I appeared in the door frame, like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, but instead of a knife I had a handful of darts. 

            “I’ve had it with you!” I screamed and began hurling them one by one at him.  The first one missed but he knocked over his big ashtray trying to duck. Then he lunged up from the chair and board, books and papers filled the air.

A dart bounced off his forehead. He stopped, not comprehending what was going on, so I quickly sent two or three more at the same bull’s-eye. He reached over and picked up a pointless dart and started laughing. I would have too, but I was already halfway out the door.

            Later I took the dartboard down and hung a huge floor-to-ceiling, 45-star American flag over the dart-cratered wall. 

 

                        *                       *                       *

            Ten years later I found myself in Vietnam. Not that I didn’t live in apartments, dorms and barracks between my childhood and being in the war.  But the truth is, I didn’t really.  Oh, my body was there, but I myself lived in the books I read and the books I imagined writing.

            The First Medical Battalion Headquarters and I had arrived in Vietnam in full battle gear on military planes leaving Fort Riley, Kansas in the middle of the night. After being stationed about twenty miles north of Saigon for five months, three of us who were tired of living in tents that were hot, smelly and blew over in the rain decided to pool our money, buy lumber and build a house. We thought that if we were going to do this we needed to have it finished before the monsoon season began. None of us knew anything about building, but remember I had my experience with blocks as a child up in the attic. I drew up a rough plan, we borrowed an Army truck and driver and after a half hour of searching through nearby small villages, bought a bunch of lumber. It cost us about 120 bucks each.

            We’ve all heard stories of barn raisings. You get food and beer, invite the neighbors and, after a half-day or so of good-natured work, there is your completed structure.  We bought a keg of beer from the officer’s mess, bribed the cooks to prepare a feast of pizza and deep-fried cheese, passed the word, and, sure enough, everyone came.  I should explain in fairness to those attending that day that Bill Ross was a big talker and Martin Sweeney, my other partner, a big drinker. Everyone came. Everyone ate and drank and had a good time sitting on the lumber. Then everyone left. We rested up for three weeks after that fiasco until I couldn’t stand hearing Ross’s stories over and over again so I decided to start building myself. I don’t know if we bought bad lumber or if it got harder sitting on the ground, but it was like rock. I had to use a chainsaw to cut it and a baby sledgehammer to drive nails through it.

            This was an unlikely design for the jungle—about 12 feet wide and 30 feet long. The roof was like an “A” frame except there were five-foot high side walls over which the roof hung about 3 feet. The tops of these walls were two-foot high screen the full length of the building. Though you couldn’t see out because of the overhang, the rain wouldn’t blow in. The front third was our lounge area and the back two-thirds, where we had our three cots. 

           After a week, I, with a little help from Sweeney and a little less from Ross, had the frame completed.  We were just in the process of starting to nail corrugated aluminum sheets over the roof structure when we got the news. The battalion commander wanted the construction stopped because (remember we were in the middle of a w.a.r.) it might be “unsafe.”

            The Corps of Engineers were called in and it was decided that it was, not only safe, but over-built and would “withstand just about anything.” So we completed the building and moved in. I had finally realized my childhood dream of living in a house, which I had designed and built myself.

            Sweeney was a psychologist.  After a few beers he often would say with a smirk in his quasi-professional tone, “There are only two kinds of people, the `livers’ and the `non-livers.’” By this I suppose he meant there are those who enjoy themselves and make the best of a situation—like building a house in the jungle—and the “non-livers”—people who go through life following orders like zombies and living in tents. But we were a medical unit in the middle of Vietnam. Everyday people were literally “non-livers.” They were the wounded and dying or those who came to us already dead to be sent home. No, there were only “the living” and “the dead” and as I stood in the doorway of our metal covered framed house and watched torrential rains sweeps across the fields, I thanked God I was still among the living.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 2

SECRET THEATER

Settled things make for explanations not for good stories. Instead, these are more often situations or people or memories that are troubling, things we want to work out and understand for ourselves and invite others along for the ride. It’s kind of a game we play with ourselves. This piece is based on an exercise from a book in college psychology.

 

                                    The Game of Without Within

 

John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman.

 

Sit down in the middle of  a quiet place,

one with  little  furnishings  is preferred.

Spend a few  minutes in silence, know-

ing that you’re both going to speak and 

to hear. Listen for the slightest  sounds.

Prepare for your  peacefulness  to end.

 

Say your own name out loud. Articulate

it distinctly and then repeat it insistently

as if  hailing another who’s away in the

distance  who can’t  see you, on a boat 

or in a foggy field. You’re calling some-

one who’s  remote in a mysterious way.

 

Lengthen  vowels  and  stress syllables,

exaggerate.Continue the calling of your

name, twenty, thirty times until you start

to get the feeling that you, yourself, are

being  called.  Keep calling.  Yes, this is

your voice but it is also something more. 

 

It’s you who are  calling, you don’t know

for whom.  It’s you who are being called,

but you don’t know from where.The one

who’s calling  is the  same,  and yet not

the same as the one who is called. Feel

the strangeness of this so familiar name.

 

Only other  people  call you this.  Go on

do it  more.  The goal  is to produce the

slight,  but  not  necessarily  unpleasant,

sense of  unease,  when  self  becomes

unstuck from self.  To escape and close

the breach,  simply say,  “Here I come!”

 

John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman. (pause) Here I come.

 

John goes to the desk, sits and turns on the gooseneck lamp. He types a few words on the old typewriter then pulls out the sheet to check what he apparently has been working on. He reads the title and the piece:

 

The Girl Who Washed Her Hands

 

Let me see, it was a few years after college. I got a teaching certificate and found myself with a position as an English teacher in a poor high school in Michigan. Most of the kids had no interest in classes, but I did have one student who was not only cute but very bright. My ex-wife and I even got to know her parents. They were old-fashioned radicals from the forties, and this was a very conservative, fundamentalist area.

            Mary also had an older sister, Jeannie. She was smart too, but psychologically troubled even at that young age. These were happy times for me. My wife and I had our first house, a little bungalow a block or so from the lake. The first years of teaching were demanding, but summers were free. Then it was back to full days of classes, and evenings and weekends correcting papers.

            Anyhow, one day this student’s mother stopped at the school late in the afternoon. (slow) She was a small woman with very short, cropped brown hair—a head like a coconut. She asked to come into my classroom and she shut the door behind her. I had no idea what this was about, but I pulled a couple of student desks around so they faced each other and motioned for her to sit down. Without further introduction, she said, (John leans forward in a whisper) “I have a terrible, family secret to tell you.”

            And what was her secret?

            I don’t know. She bent forward in the desk toward me, speaking in hushed tones. So much so that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. You’ve done that, haven’t you? In order to be polite, pretend to hear or be interested in something inaudible someone says to you?

Later, I thought, perhaps, she’d said she was suicidal or that she had been molested by her father.  But at the time my first reaction was that this didn’t have anything to do with the girls. My next one was, why is this woman telling this secret to me?”

            Jeannie had a weird boyfriend but she received good grades and graduated to go on to college.  Mary blossomed, too.  She was a straight `A’ student, a top vocalist, had poems published in literary magazines–and remember she was only a high school student—starred in school plays, was an active environmental organizer, etc., etc.  But no boyfriends!  Even though she had naturally blonde hair and a wonderful smile. A wonderful, seductive smile. Boys were intimidated by her because she was so far beyond anyone else her age in accomplishments. And I’ll admit, to me she was more like an interesting peer than a student. But at that time I didn’t allow myself to think if it was anything other than that.

            Senior year, Mary suddenly gave up everything for religion. Some kind of charismatic Christianity. She was living like a Bible-story virgin who’d delivered herself over entirely to God. She got a full scholarship to the University of Chicago to study theology and that was the last I saw of her until three years ago. She was eighteen when I was her teacher and now many years later, she was thirty-six.  Of course I was old enough to be her father, but when she telephoned I was still trying to come to terms with my separation, and to hear this warm, familiar voice…well, I was very pleased.

I forgot to say that I’d heard she had had a nervous breakdown that first year at the University. A student who was a photographer for the yearbook—I was the advisor—had a brother who worked in a mental institution. Mary was taken there after the breakdown. (slower) The brother said she couldn’t stop washing her hands. Two hundred, three hundred times a day she would wash her hands. The other thing I learned, and I don’t remember how, was that Frank was not really the girls’ father. He had married the mother when she’d already had the two young children.

            Can we re-create ourselves like motivational books and tapes lead us to believe?  Or is it fate? Are we doomed to always repeat the past in some superficially different form?

            Whether the past is a treasure worth reclaiming or some kind of stigma that marks us and turns ordinary things we do into penance, it’s always there, isn’t it? And sometimes it surfaces as unexpectedly as a phone call. A phone call in the middle of the night from Chicago.

            Mary called out of nowhere late one night. She had found my name through an Internet search. I’d just come home and hadn’t even had time to turn on the lights and there, over the receiver, was her voice in the dark, coming out of the past.

I pictured those thin white arms and animated hands, her full mouth and wavy blonde hair. I could almost smell Lake Michigan and feel the trudge of walking barefoot in the sand of the lakeshore dunes. It had been almost twenty years since my first wife and I’d packed up the kids and left Michigan for a new life in Wisconsin. A life of frustration and financial hardship that had ultimately driven us apart. But now, in the sound of Mary’s voice, there was promise bubbling up like an underground spring.

            Mary and I talked for an hour and a half. Her parents, Elsie and Frank, had died five years earlier within months of each other. Her sister, Jeannie, had not married her boyfriend but a rather conservative businessman. She’d been on medication for depression, but last summer decided not to take her drugs anymore. Like Virginia Wolfe, one night she walked out into Duck Lake until she drowned. Now Mary Briggs—`Briggs’ was her married name—was alone except for her husband of a year. He too had left her but then he’d come back, she said, providing she agreed to “certain conditions.”

            Anyway, she wanted to see me…had to see me. She wondered if that would be possible. As it turned out, I needed to schedule a business trip to Chicago within the next two weeks. I told her I would call the following day after I’d pinned down a date.

            But something was strange right from the start.

            When I called her the following night, she said, “Hello.” I gave my name, but then as I started to talk about what day I’d be in Chicago, without saying a further word, she hung up.

            I called again thinking that I might have dialed the wrong number, but the same thing happened a second time.

            She phoned the next morning with absolutely no explanation for what had occurred the night before, telling me that she’d be overjoyed to meet with me. We set up a time and place, though when I hung up the phone, I had a vaguely unsettled feeling.

            I arrived in the Old Town section of Chicago—where we had arranged to meet—about an hour early. I thought I’d have trouble finding parking, but as it turned out there was a spot just behind the restaurant. It was a warm late- afternoon in June and I sat at a table outside.

            I have to admit I did have a few beers while I waited. I’d grown up in Chicago and the afternoon was awash with memories. As a kid I’d taken the el to this part of town and explored its shops and coffee houses. During my college breaks I’d hit one or more of the clubs to catch folk music acts and sometimes get a little intoxicated. And now, here I was again, at this new stage in my life.

            The meeting lasted less than a minute. What I remember most is mumbling some excuse, then walking, almost at a run, through the restaurant, past the kitchen and out the door to my car parked in back.

I was sitting at that outdoor table looking down the street when I heard a voice. It came from the sidewalk behind my back. It said, “Mr. Lehman?”

            I turned slowly not knowing what to expect. It had been many years since I’d last seen Mary but I still half thought she’d look the same. She stood in front of the setting sun and I was blinded by it at first. I could only make out the shape of her body and her golden hair. The blonde around her head glowed like a rim of sun around the moon in a solar eclipse.

When Mary came forward—as she bent down toward me out of that halo of sun—I saw that it was not the sweet face I’d remembered, but the shriveled face of her mother’s coconut head…

 

…and from its pressed lips came a whisper. It said, “…I want my secret back.”

 

With this last sentence John turns off the table light again leaving the room in complete darkness.

 

Pause.

 

Another reason we hesitate to share stories is that they may seem too personal for listeners to become involved with it? Had I identified Mary’s secret in this story, it might the ending might have been less interesting. It’s like with that poem, “The Handout” we all believe there is some key to life’s mystery just beyond our grasp. We’d like to believe this truth is universal, applicable to everyone equally, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps each of us has our own secret theater in our imagination showing films we create especially to fit only us.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Part 1

Today I’m beginning a new presentation. I originally gave this in Milwuakee three years ago. I think it still says a lot about writing and story telling. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you do. – John

A Brief History of My Tattoo

Thirteen Things I Never Told Anyone Before

 

The Handout

Each of you should have received a handout.

There were some problems and there are more

people here than expected, so if you don’t have

a handout, please look on with your neighbor.

The handout lists the twelve things you must

know in order to achieve success. Without these

I’m afraid you’ll have pretty rough going, and

ultimately will fail. But here are the simple rules,

a list of resources and the practical timeline you

need, all clearly spelled out for you to succeed.

If neither you nor your neighbor has the handout,

ordinarily I’d say raise your hand and I would

give you one. But, I’m sorry, I just don’t have any

additional handouts—that’s what I’ve been trying

to explain. I know that may not seem fair, but

this is something addressed at great length in point

seven of the handout. In fact all your questions

are answered by the handout. Success would be

yours if you had a handout. Life would be easy

if you had a handout. If only you had a handout,

happiness would be guaranteed.

 

The Perfect Crime

I’d always thought it would be my son and I doing things together, but it is my daughter and I who are alike. Sometimes too much alike. After she graduated from NYU in theater she got a job as an understudy for an off-Broadway play, “The Perfect Crime.” She did this for two years. Unfortunately, the lead female—the only woman in the production and the one who had written the play—prided herself on seldom missing a performance. My daughter rarely got to go on before a live audience. Eventually Pam quit and then suffered the usual problem of actors in New York: trying to get roles. So she decided to come back home to the Midwest and attend graduate school in education. After being accepted to the University of Wisconsin she didn’t much attend classes. Instead she formed her own theater company with the intent of putting on an original play—if Wisconsin couldn’t go to New York, then she’d bring New York to Wisconsin.

“Pop,” she said, “you have to audition for this play. There’s a part in it that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not much of an actor but agreed to try out. I thought it would support her effort and give us a chance, as adults, to work on something together. I did the audition and she turned me down.

I admit I had chosen an unusual vehicle to show off my talent, or lack of talent. My monologue was of a soul leaving a recently deceased body. The words were those of Martin Luther King, Jr. but given a different, dramatic emphasis:

“Free at Last”—relief. “Free at last!”—glee. “Thank God Almighty…” —uncertainty“…I’m free at last—dread.

Perhaps she thought I was making fun of her audition process. Part of the try-out was for her to work with the actor, giving direction to get more out of the person’s chosen lines. How much direction can you give a disembodied soul? And no matter what she said all I was capable of was a sort of silent screen version of relief, glee, uncertainty and dread.

I wanted the production to be successful, and it was, but there was always this small part of me—a teeny part—that resented being excluded, especially when she confided in me about problems she was having with the actors she picked—not learning their lines, being late for rehearsals, etc. I would never have done that, I told myself, as I listened with sympathy— “sympathy.”

 Then the last performance of the last week of the show, something strange happened. One of the actors, a young college girl, left the stage after her early scene and went out the back door of the theater. She left the play and the theater in the middle of the show—the one unforgivable theatrical crime. The other actors improvised as best they could around this void, and when the final curtain came down people applauded as other audiences had.

But I sometimes think about this girl.

She had had all the direction and stress she could take. So she just packed up and left. And, somehow I felt…

Well I could picture her walking down the dark alley to her car, and perhaps saying to herself,  “Free at last. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

Thanks for being here this evening. I have subtitled this performance, “Thirteen Things I’ve Never Told Anyone Before.” And you might ask, “Why hasn’t he told them?” Well, one reason is, in the case of this last episode it was my story to tell. But in a way I made it my own by asking my daughter to direct my telling of it at the Cornerstone Theater in Milwaukee where this first was performed. How’s that for irony. But I wanted to see what would happen. For in reality most story ideas won’t be things that we already know and have settled. Settled things make for explanations not for good stories. Instead, these are more often situations or people or memories that are troubling, things we want to work out and understand for ourselves and invite others along for the ride. It’s kind of a game we play with ourselves.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Final

Promises to keep...

He died on January 28^th, 1963, near midnight, losing consciousness soon after a blood clot reached his lungs. A great and long life had come quietly to an end. America had lost a poet of astounding grace and wisdom. He was not a monster or malcontent as some biographers have tried to depict him. While hardly a saint, Frost was a passionate, headstrong man who believed deeply that, despite a life of personal tragedy, poetry never let him down. And poetry can mean the same to us.

 

Poetry is a way of living, not just a way to communicate the experiences we have had. Frost believed that for our own survival we need to throw ourselves into it with energy, abandon and trust. We will be rewarded accordingly. That, more than any particular Frost poem, as great as it may be, is the richness of his gift to us.

 

(John, with passion.)

 

Birches

 

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves;

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

As so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

 

(The lights slowly fade to black.)

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 10

(John stands, takes off his coat.)

 

I never met Robert Frost, but I did meet John Updike once and discussed with him this account he wrote for the New Yorker of seeing the poet perform in Sanders Theater at Harvard

 

(John pulls a New Yorker off the table and reads.)

 

Robert Frost was relentless in the number of public readings he gave. In Allen Ginsberg’s words, “He created an audience for poetry readings… He was the first voyager, a kind of pioneer, the original entrepreneur of poetry.“

 

I remember Frost shambled about on the stage as if he had been prodded from a sound winter’s sleep; he “said”—as he put it—his poems rather rapidly, minimizing their music in his haste to get on with his spoken commentary on whatever came to his mind. In the front rows sat the flower of the English faculty, most conspicuously Archibald MacLeish, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Compared to these exemplars of civilized letters, Frost was an untamed beast, a man who had wriggled or quarreled his way out of every academic post he had had, though his appetite for instructing others was powerful. As a literary artist, he was, we all knew, the real thing, the one man in the hall—and, for that matter, in all of safe, sane Cambridge—who had staked his whole soul on poetry and had gained the ultimate prize.”

 

Shortly after his trip to Russia, Frost was admitted to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Cambridge on December 3, 1962. An examination showed that his prostrate was abnormally large and his bladder was infected. The surgery that took place a week later revealed even worse problems. He recovered but was obviously in bad shape. On top of everything, his heart had been damaged.

There was one bright spot in his older age however.  After the death of his wife, Frost became strongly attracted to Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, married to Theodore Morrison. Frost employed her from 1938 as his secretary and adviser, but over time also became his lover. Frost bought a small, wood-frame farmhouse on 150 acres at Bread Loaf—a writing conference Ted Morrison ran at which Frost was a regular presenter. A few minutes’ walk uphill, on the edge of the woods, was a self-contained cabin with a stone fireplace and pleasant screened-in porch offering a dramatic view across a meadow. The Morrisons occupied the farmhouse. Kay would phone Frost and he would come down for meals which the three of them would eat together. Every morning she would go up to the cabin and work with him on his letters and arrangements. Kay was beautiful, charming and sophisticated in a way Frost had rarely seen in a woman. He liked her independence and she…provided order and grace to his later years.

Out through the fields and the woods

     And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

     And looked at the world, and descended:

I have come by the highway home,

     And lo, it is ended.

 

Frost wrote these lines in his poem “Reluctance” which ends prophetically,

 

            Ah, when to the heart of man

                 Was it ever less than a treason

            To go with the drift of things,

                 To yield with a grace to reason,

            And bow and accept the end

                 Of a love or a season?

           

 

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 9

On the other hand what if there were a metaphor in which all we had were the column of traits on the left, and the heading to which they were to be compared on the right—an “open metaphor”? In a long metaphoric work we would call this a parable, or if it involved animals, a fable. But this “open metaphor” is precisely what Frost does in his poems. He gives us one side of the comparison then forces us to find the correspondences to the other. This is why I believe he did not want to give us his definitive interpretation of his pieces. He’s encouraging us to become poets. How does he get readers to make the leap? He chooses a picture that seems silly if we only take it literally. This is the ending of Frost’s “Birches”:

 

            One by one he subdued his father’s trees

            By riding them down over and over again

            Until he took the stiffness out of them,

            And not one but hung limp, not one was left

            For him to conquer. He learned all there was

            To learn about not launching out too soon

            And so not carrying the tree away

            Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

            To the top branches, climbing carefully

            With the same pains you use to fill a cup

            Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

            Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

            Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

            So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

            And so I dream of going back to be.

 

This is an old man at the end of his life, how can he desire to be swinging on trees. He can’t, so the “learn about not launching out to soon” “keeping his poise,” “and climbing carefully / With the same pains you use to fill a cup / Up to the brim, and even above the brim” must apply figuratively to something else, like “a lifetime.” Frost thinks readers can make the connection because, like all poets, he believes they are there in reality and he trusts we can know them (probably through the senses and intuition—the domain of poetry—rather than through our intellect). He encourages us to find meaning beyond what is expressed by not doing it for us, by selecting subjects that are suggestive (rich in connotation) and, as in “Birches,” makes closed metaphors (climbing to the tree’s top is like filling a cup) that are an example of the kind of comparison he wants us to make using the entire poem as metaphor. And in case we miss the point there are the titles that point the way.

           

But the point isn’t just a particular poem; it’s the embracing of the process of seeing things poetically. At the conclusion of an essay titled “The Figure A Poem Makes,” which I’ve abridged here, he sums up this belief:

 

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. 

 

For me, the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step, the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken… 

           

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.  A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.  Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went. 

 

It’s with these three accomplishments—shaping movement like a piece of music, giving us the emotional beats of drama and forcing us to look at poetry as a mirror to meaning—that Robert Frost makes poetry soar and shows us how to soar along with it.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 8

Robert Frost reads Rosebud.

(John goes over to the coat rack and puts on his old slicker as if to go. Then he stops, as if changing his mind, turns around and pulls a chair to the edge of the stage. Headdresses the audience thoughtfully.)

 

When Robert Frost gave readings, he would present a minimum number of his poems and comment very little on them. He preferred to ramble about politics, berate others who he felt were in competition with him or talk about teaching and the process of writing. When asked questions about a specific work, he often gave contradictory answers: “Oh, it’s just a little winter scene, don’t read too much into it.” or “That was the evening I was considering killing myself.” He put on a bit of a contrary New England farmer act. I know how that goes. We from Wisconsin like to do the same thing when we find ourselves in sophisticated surroundings, such as New York City or Los Angeles. It’s called being a “country slicker.” You play dumb so others underrate your abilities, often to their detriment later. But my guess is that Frost was up to something else that has to do with why his poems are cited today by everyone from writers of New Age self-help books to political conservatives.

 

What are the central metaphors of these poems by Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas: “After Geat Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes,” “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “Fog,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night?” A metaphor is talking about one thing in terms of another. It’s a comparison that helps us understand something complex or abstract or unfamiliar by showing its similarities to something concrete that we are familiar with and can more easily grasp. Here are a few lines that tell you the metaphors of the titles I’ve just given. “As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go–” “Because I could not stop for Death– / He kindly stopped for me— / The Carriage held but just Ourselves— / And Immortality.” , “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” “Let us go then, you and I, /  When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” “Do not go gentle into that good night.“  Grief is compared to freezing, dying to a carriage ride, fog to a kitten, night to an etherized patient and death to sleep. Unless you’re an English, major my guess is you only may have known one or two of these.

 

Now tell me the central metaphor of these poems: “The Road Not Taken,” “The Mending Wall,”  “Home Burial,” “Birches,” “After Apple-Picking” and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night”? Easy, the central symbol is right in the title. But what is it being compared to? The answer to that question is, I believe, a third trait of Frost’s greatness and the real reason his poetry soars. Here’s what he said about the importance of metaphors:              

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors…and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have.  Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.  People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?”  We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets.  We like to talk in parables and in hints and indirections–whether from diffidence or some other instinct… The only thing that can disappoint me is a lack of enthusiasm and my own failure to make metaphor.  My ambition has been to have it said of me: He made a few connections.”

                                                     

Let me distinguish between two types of metaphor. What I’ll call a “closed metaphor” directly draws the comparison—death is like sleep, for example (this is a simile, or expressed rather than implied comparison, but still a type of metaphor). We understand and have experienced sleep, whereas if we want to get some feeling for death, which we have not experienced firsthand, we need to use a comparison. To the left on a blackboard (if we had one) we could make a column of the traits of sleep and then connect some with traits of death in a column to the right. Some traits they share that easily come to mind are: a lack of consciousness in both or, perhaps, being weary at the end of the day is like being weary toward the end of life. We might draw some conclusions that are less sound, i.e., we wake up from sleep therefore there must be resurrection after death; but aptness (as well as originality) determines why one metaphor is better than another. In the poems by Dickinson, Sandburg, Eliot and Thomas these comparisons are drawn out. 

 

On the other hand what if there were a metaphor in which all we had were the column of traits on the left, and the heading to which they were to be compared on the right—an “open metaphor”? In a long metaphoric work we would call this a parable, or if it involved animals, a fable. But this “open metaphor” is precisely what Frost does in his poems. He gives us one side of the comparison then forces us to find the correspondences to the other. This is why I believe he did not want to give us his definitive interpretation of his pieces. He’s encouraging us to become poets. How does he get readers to make the leap? He chooses a picture that seems silly if we only take it literally.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 7

Now let me address these three elements that I feel distinguish great poetry from good poetry. The first is that great poetry, such as Frost’s, “shapes movement.” Poetry has something prose does not, and that is the margins of white space to the left and right. That means that as a poet I am deciding how to end the line, not just letting the word processor automatically move the cursor to the next because I’ve run out of space. When you combine line breaks with sentences, you have the ability to move the reader forward, slow them down or bring them to a complete halt. For example, compare the last two stanzas of “Come In.” Here is the second to last:

Far in the pillared dark

Thrush music went—

Almost like a call to come in

To the dark and lament.

 

It is one sentence but broken over four lines. With “Far in the pillared dark” we want to stop because it’s the end of the line, but it is not the end of the sentence, so it pulls us around the bend to the next line, which does the same thing as does following line. Only when we get to the period does this flow come to a complete stop. Now compare that to the movement of the last stanza, which like a piece of music is manipulating that rhythm to give dramatic emphasis to the conclusion.

 

But no, I was out for stars:

 

This comes as close to a stop as it can without the use of a period.

 

I would not come in.

 

In reality, this is a sentence that stands alone. It is the statement of defiance the poet makes and we would understand it by its defiant tone even if we couldn’t make out its words. But Frost goes on, to a wonderful anti-climax, almost returning to that flow, but then giving the poem its masterful twist through an abrupt change of perspective. Nothing is simple, the poet seems to be saying. Nothing is black and white.

 

I mean not even if asked,

And I hadn’t been.

 

Most poets break lines by phrases or concepts, but Frost carries us with his flow from one line to the next, then stops us in our tracks. “His head carved out of granite, / His hair a wayward drift of snow / He worshiped the great God of Flow / By holding on and letting go.”

 

Frost acknowledged that vowels in words do have accents (that’s what we find in the dictionary, and by the careful arrangement of those accented words create a line of metered poetry). He also claimed we give a particular word more emphasis than another in a sentence depending upon the sense of what we’re trying to convey. He believed that we further enhance the dynamics of the poem’s flow by stretching the spoken sentence (with its stresses based on meaning) over the line of poetry—in the case of his work, that line is iambic pentameter with its stresses determined by the length of the words vowels.

 

“An ear and an appetite for those sounds of sense are the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse,” he said.  Those who praise Frost for capturing the way people talk and putting it into poetry are missing the point. His poetry is powerful because of the flow which he controls through line breaks and at what points he starts and stops sentences. An ability we all have beyond anything we learn in books and school, if we stop and use it. He wrote: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”

 

Another element besides “movement” is something I’ve already identified, called  “emotional beats.” It’s that shift back and forth between feeling one way and then another. Should we take this path or that one, stop by the woods or move on.

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

                       

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

 

So here we have life reduced down to two possibilities: stop or move on. There are enticements to both: the drama is in not knowing which the narrator will choose, or for that matter, which we would choose. It’s like a basketball game between two sides or a soap opera; and the closer matched the teams, or the stronger the motives of two characters in a scene, the more we are pulled into the dilemma. We want to know how it will turn out.

 

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

 

But this isn’t a linguistic exercise or a game or a soap opera. The poet toward the end of his life is struggling. He is weary and would like to give up, but he also has obligations. The decision comes with consequences whichever he decides to do. And here’s the thing which non-poets seldom realize. The writer doesn’t decide what he or she will do and then write this out to communicate it to an audience. The writer stands on the edge of an abyss and it’s only in the writing that the answer is discovered. There is a risk most of us are not brave enough to take. The poet does it for us, and allows you and me an additional safety valve or escape mechanism—we can say, “It’s only a poem,” “It’s only a play.” “It’s only art.”

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

Frost wrote this poem at his kitchen table late at night when he was under particularly heavy strain. His legs ached, and eating and sleep were out of the question, even though he was enjoying the solitude of a house in which everyone else was asleep. He had been working on another poem all evening long when he stopped, walked outside into the snow for a few minutes, then came in and wrote this (though he had trouble with the last stanza). As we hear it now, there is something in the repetitions of the poem that haunt us. “And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” Had Frost written the line once we might have taken it to mean only that the traveler had a long way to go that night; the repetition adds an ominous element. We begin to question what Frost really meant, which is the point: Frost’s traveler does not know where ultimately he is heading, just as travelers in life are sometimes uncertain of their final destination. There is a subtle shift of tone into a kind of hypnotic mindlessness.

 

Frost wrote: 

A poem has denouement.  It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last.  It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—the happy-sad blend of the drinking song. 

 

He adds—and there were never two truer sentences ever written:

 

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 6

Fixity and Energy

The third poem I want to read to you now is called “After Apple-Picking.” Its literal meaning pretty well speaks for itself. But like “For Once Then Something” there is a metaphoric meaning, also. “After Apple-Picking” takes up the workings of the imagination. Frost’s old Harvard professor, George Santayana, once defined the artist as “a person consenting to dream of reality.” This poem talks about “the great harvest” of imaginative work that the narrator “himself desired. Can you imagine a better analogy for a poet and his lifetime gathering of poems?

 

 

(With a sigh John sits and slouches down on his chair. He reads.)

 

After Apple-Picking

 

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the bought bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

 

 

(John puts the book down and addresses the audience.)

 

 

I’ve read quite a bit of Frost’s poetry since that day on the sloping porch of his Franconia farmhouse and have asked myself, as perhaps you have, what is it about Frost’s work that makes his poetry special? Before answering that question, I’d like to take a minute to think about what makes poetry, poetry.

 

Donald Hall, who followed Frost then Roethke at the University of Michigan, states that at minimum, poetry is different than prose in these two distinguishing characteristics: fixity and energy. “Fixity” means there is one exact word and a correct placement of that word. He claims, if you change a sentence or paragraph of a novel it will not greatly alter its meaning. If you change one word of a poem, you change that poem. Here’s a very short poem by Frost that illustrates this:

 

THE SPAN OF A LIFE

            The old dog barks backward without getting up.

            I can remember when he was a pup.

 

It uses all simple words, but one that I think is pivotal is the word “backward.” “The old dog barks backward…” suggests a reflective quality that I’m not sure a dog has, but his owner might. The poet could have simply said, “The old dog barks…” but look at what would be lost. And “barks” suggests an active, even alarmed reaction that “The old dog looks backward…” wouldn’t. Poets are particularly concerned with the right connotation, as well as the sound and even sometimes its history. It’s all these associated things that lead Frost to say, “Poetry is what is lost in translation.”  There are no synonyms. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken contract between the poet and the reader. The poet says, “I will take time to find that right word, if you will take time to appreciate why I have chosen this one in place of another.” An arrangement that somewhat complacent, contemporary audiences do not want to accept.    

                                                                                                                                   

“Energy” simply means the efficiency with which a poet uses language. In two lines we have, not only a picture of an old dog, but also of the observer “looking” backward over both their lives. Visually we don’t get much of an image, but read the lines again and notice the long, accented vowels of the first line that cause us to read it slowly, then contrast them with the short, prancing-puppy like ones of the second. Frost uses the title to push this sound picture into metaphor. That’s one of three traits of his poetry, that go beyond fixity and energy.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 5

(The stage is pretty much as it was before. The lights come up slowly to reveal John sitting at the table, with a book in hand. The easel to the far right has a placard that now says “Swinging on Birches.” To the left, a second easel has a blowup photo of Frost as an old man.)

                                               

(John reads.)                                        

 

The Road Not Taken

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning, equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. 

 

(John stands up and continues reading.)

   

Mending Wall

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it

And spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. it comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.” I could say, “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there,

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

 

(John comments to the audience.)

 

A close look at the first poem shows that both paths are equally traveled—he says “Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” But who cares. There is that dramatic opposition and each of us has probably felt at a fork in the road at one time or another and we like to think we took the challenging one, the one that made us the individuals we are today. Can’t you just see Frost picturing some grandfather telling his grandchildren, “I took the road less traveled,” while knowing he was really doing a little posturing in front of them. Frost thought he was that maverick, that rugged individualist. In regard to his poetry he was actually pretty traditional. He was a “rugged traditionalist.”  

 

But “Mending Wall” took on some interesting historical significance. Toward the end of his life, September of 1962 to be exact, Frost agreed to go to Russia for the State Department as sort of a cultural good will ambassador. In Moscow he was greeted by a delegation of young Russian writers who liked the fiercely independent quality of his work and his humanism. Later, at a public reading outside of Leningrad, the auditorium was crowded and the audience responded warmly. He recited from memory many of his classic poems including “Mending Wall.” The applause was thunderous. 

A few days after he became ill. Nikita Khrushchev sent his personal physician and later visited the poet himself. That may have been Frost’s personal agenda all along. Meeting Khrushchev had come to seem a test of some kind. Frost was both thrilled and nervous. And what subject did the American bring up when they did confront one another? The Berlin Wall.  

With stunning audacity, Frost proposed reuniting East and West Berlin, a suggestion that provoked Khrushchev into a defensive position. Frost asserted that the unstable arrangement could provoke a world war. Frost reminded Khruschev that both the United States and the Soviet Union had a common European ancestry, with certain cultural values that were shared, as opposed to those of China and even Africa. Both agreed that there should be more talking and less name calling between the two super powers.“

 

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out.

 

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – PART 4

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

 

Robert Frost died on January 23^rd, 1963. The poet Robert Francis wrote of him:

 

His head carved out of granite,

His hair a wayward drift of snow

He worshiped the great God of Flow

By holding on and letting go.

 

 

That Fall at Franconia Farm, my wife and I had walked around back of the house as if to say Frost had gone to town to fetch a sack of groceries or some nails. As if to say, “He’ll return. There’s time yet.”

 

Imagine you are with me now, at Franconia Farm. We’re back behind the house along a less-traveled path of curling leaves, sitting on logs of birches neatly stacked like parchments. From the woods a thrush calls, the scent of apples fills the air. All too soon we must go. “But wait,” you ask, “What are we looking for in poetry, in life. What is it we are really seeking from Frost and other poets?”

 

It’s a question that Frost asked of himself. In his poem “For Once Then Something” he’s kneeling at an old fashioned outdoor well, looking over the edge of its stonewall at the water. What he sees is, well, pretty much a mirrored image of himself staring down. Behind him, in the reflection, are trees like a wreath around his head and puffs of clouds. Nothing wrong with that, but can poetry show us anything more than glorify the self we already know? The poem goes on and for once the person looking at the water does see something beyond the surface, something uncertain, something deeper.

 

But then a drip of water falls from a fern and the ripples it causes on the water blur whatever was beneath. “What was it?” the poet asks. And here we get Frost’s sense of dramatic opposites: “Truth” with a capital “T” or “a pebble”—something so small it is hardly anything. He doesn’t know. It matters, yes, but what is more important, poetry has given the writer, and reader, the certainty not only that there is a world beyond our perception of it, but that it is one we can, if the circumstances are right, actually perceive, if only for an instant. And that glimpse of something outside ourselves is worth a lifetime of looking.

 

(John reads this from a paper as Frost might)

 

 

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

 

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike,

Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths–and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth?  A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

 

(John moves to the front of the stage and addresses the audience directly.)

 

Robert Frost once wrote to Edwin Arlington Robinson, ‘My utmost of ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.’

 

Let’s look a deeper look at a few of those poems and learn how he accomplished that with an eye to how we might do the same.

 

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 3

John Lehman stopping by the woods

Here is something I discovered myself about drama from Frost’s poetry. A number of years ago, three other poets and myself had a book published called Quick Blue Gathering. When we did readings together we each took the podium for fifteen minutes and read our poems. It occurred to me that this might be more interesting if there was one thing that a couple of us did together. I took Robert Frost’s Death of a Hired Hand and broke it into a reading for two voices. My friend, Rita Miller, and I read the parts. I was surprised at how easy this was to do and how effective the result.

 

Many years later, when Shrine of the Tooth Fairy came out, I asked my wife if she’d help me in a reading, in the same way, but this time with a few of my poems. They also easily split into two voices (though not necessarily male and female, sometimes they were father/ daughter, or the older poet reminiscing about myself as a younger man). That sent me back to Frost, and sure enough, almost all his poems contain some kind of opposites, each easily expressed by a different voice: the road more traveled or the road less traveled, stopping by the woods on a snowy night or (as the little horse prods) moving on, swinging skyward on birches or returning to earth, building a wall or tearing it down, picking apples or giving it up for the winter.

 

In everyday living we try to avoid or resolve conflict, but conflict is what creates drama.  Under the control of the written page, we explore ramifications beyond everyday life.  It’s not enough to experience reality on the page.  We want heightened reality.  A practical lesson I‘ve learned is that whenever a poem I’m writing seems flat, I search out the opposites in it and build them up. Opposites are what make a piece exciting–we don’t know what’s going to happen. As the advantage switches from one side to the other, we in the audience experience an emotional swing. In writing these are called “emotional beats.” They work the same way as one team grabbing the ball from another in the fourth quarter of an exciting basketball team. Just as in Frost’s poems, we become engrossed wondering which of the opposing sides is going to win.

          

Here is an excerpt of a very long poem by Frost called “Home Burial.” It’s actually better if you don’t know what it’s about, because then you can better appreciate the interaction between the man and the woman. Much of this is conveyed ththrough their changing physical positions in the scene:

 

(John to read this slowly and deliberately as Robert Frost might.)

 

           He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

                       Before she saw him.  She was staring down,

                       Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

           She took a doubtful step and then undid it

           To raise herself and look again.  He spoke

           Advancing toward her: `What is it you see

           From up there always–for I want to know.’

           She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,

           And her face changed from terrified to dull.

           He said to gain time: `What is it you see?’

           Mounting until she cowered under him.

           `I will find out now–you must tell me, dear.’

           She, in her place, refused him any help

           With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

           She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,

           Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see.

           But at last he murmured, `Oh,’ and again, `Oh,’

           `What is it–what?” she said.

                                                                         `Just that I see.’

           `You don’t,’ she challenged. `Tell me what it is.’

                      

                                                                      

In describing the camera shots of Citizen Kane, Orson Wells once said he wanted each character to have his or her own unique angle so that even if a viewer didn’t know the plot the viewer would be able to understand the story. We’re always looking up at Kane (Wells even built a trapdoor on the set to get the camera at a very low angle) and looking down at Susan Alexander, the singer who is his less-than-talented protégé. Remember the camera shot that comes down through the skylight of a nightclub where she’s performing? Well here we have the same thing, but it’s even better because the man and woman change position as the emotional advantage swings from one to the other. The man begins at the foot of the stairs and rises to eventually tower over her, however they are both upstaged by an unknown presence outside, which they glance at through the window.

          

The couple in the poem has lost their child. What she always sees–and he comes to see– is the child’s grave outside the window (the “home burial” of the title). She’s lost in her grief; he sublimates his by returning to the routine of work. This is intolerable to her, and, despite his threats that if she walks out the door she can never return, she leaves. Their marriage is over (also the “home burial” of the title). Frost uses his characters as a director of a stage play might, and the result is that we experience the feelings of both people as if they were our own. In Frost’s case they were. He and his wife had tragically lost a baby, but unlike the couple in the poem they were able to weather it together. Why would he change the ending in the poem? The easy answer is that he was trying to make it more dramatic. A more thoughtful one might be that within the safety of art he was playing out his (and our) worst fears in order to see what would happen.

 

No, Robert and  Elinor White had a union that was filled with losses and feelings of alienation. Their first son died from cholera at age three; Frost blamed himself for not calling a doctor earlier and believed that God was punishing him for it.

 

Frost’s own health declined, and his wife became depressed. In 1907, they had a daughter who died three days after birth, and a few years later, Elinor had a miscarriage. Within a couple years, his sister Jeanie died in a mental hospital, and his daughter, Marjorie, of whom he was extremely fond, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Marjorie died a slow death after getting married and giving birth, and a few years later, Frost’s wife died from heart failure. His adult son, Carol, had become increasingly distraught, and Frost went to visit him and to talk him out of suicide. Thinking the crisis had passed, he returned home, and shortly afterward, his son shot himself. He also had to commit his daughter, Irma, to a mental hospital.

 

While countless readers admire Frost’s skill, his cracker-barrel charm, his meticulous details and natural symbols, many of us fail to notice that he is ultimately a poet of loss and limitation and loneliness, of desolation and extinction. If his gaze was steady, it was also unflinching.

 

And through all of this, Robert Frost still became one of the most famous poets in the United States. He said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word.”

 

After Frost died, John F. Kennedy had this to say about him, “If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths.”

 

Frost said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: ’It goes on.’”

 

 

 

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – Part 2

 

Good fences make good poets.

(John moves over to the table and slumps down, he is gradually becoming more Frost like in posture and voice.)

 

Frost talked and wrote a great deal about poetry, but one of the truest things he ever stated is, “A piece of writing is as good as its drama.” He certainly proved it that day. 

 

You know we think of Robert Frost as the quintessential New Englander, but he was actually born in San Francisco, March 26, 1874. His father was a political rebel who named his new son, Robert Lee Frost, after the Southern Civil War Leader. His father was alcoholic, abusive and remote so it fell to his mother to nurture and instruct him. She read him religious stories, myths and fairy tales. Later, she read aloud to him the poems of Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow. The boy didn’t really read for himself until he was fourteen, but he wrote his first poem at fifteen and had his first published in a local paper three years later.

 

When Frost’s father died of tuberculosis in 1885, he left his family with just $8 after his funeral expenses had been paid. Robert, with his mother and younger sister, moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his grandfather. He married Elinor in 1895. She and Robert had been co-valedictorians of their high school class. He then headed off to Dartmouth College where he was bored and quickly dropped out of college. He fell more and more into long walks, night and day walks in the woods and hills. At the fraternity he had joined, where his antisocial behavior was making him unpopular, he was asked what he did in the woods alone. His response was, “I gnaw wood.”

 

Frost next enrolled in Harvard living with his wife, young son and mother-in-law in a small Cambridge apartment. Plagued with ill health and now having a new daughter added to the family, he dropped out of Harvard and took up poultry farming. His first son died of cholera at the age of four. But with his grandfather’s help, he purchased a 30-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire, working by day and writing by night at the kitchen table.

 

About those days he said, “I was ambition-less, purposeless. For months on end I would do no work at all. I didn’t write because I wanted to write; I wrote because I wrote. I would exchange work with another farmer, perhaps during the haying, and for three weeks would sweat and toughen up. Then the hay fever would come on, and I would do no work until another haying.”

 

“No one can make a living at poetry,” his grandfather told him. “But I tell you what,” he added shrewdly, “ we’ll give you a year to make a go of it. You’ll have to promise to quit writing if you can’t make a success of it in a year. What do you say”? “Give me twenty,” the nineteen year old replied. And twenty years later, almost to the month, Robert Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, was published in England where he, his wife and children had temporarily moved, followed a year later by North of Boston. One enthusiastic critic wrote, “Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and women into poetry.”

 

When he and his little family landed in New York, he had only a few dollars left. They carried their hand luggage across town to the elevated train, took it to 42nd Street and then rode a 42^nd Street trolley across town to Grand Central Station. On one of the newsstands they passed, Frost’s eye was caught by the issue of the New Republic with his name and the title “The Death of the Hired Man” displayed on the cover. He had never heard of the New Republic; he had not even heard that Henry Holt and Company were publishing his poems in the United States. He left his family sitting in the station and went to the Henry Holt office. There he was given a check from the New Republic. He and his wife could now get to New Hampshire and start their life in America again. The man who had left as an unknown writer came back to be hailed as a leader of the new era in American poetry. He later went on to teach at Dartmouth, Amherst and the University of Michigan, and four times Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best book of poetry of the year—the only poet to ever achieve that quadruple distinction.

 

But let me take a short detour here and tell you a little story of something I discovered myself about drama from Frost’s poetry.  (to be continued)

STOPPING BY THE WOODS – PART 1

The Always Robert Frost

 

 

 

This is a behind the scenes look at Robert Frost and his work. If you are curious about poetry at all it will give you some guidelines that will help you make your work more memorable. Or if you just wonder about the man behind the legend, here are some clues. I originally prepared this as a reading. Let me know how you like it. John Lehman.

 

(The stage is dark. A spotlight switches on abruptly focusing on the center of the stage. John appears from stage right in a lumber jacket and baseball cap. To the far right is an easel upon which are signs that identify the first segment and then the second. The first says “Holding on and letting go.” To the left, a second easel that has blowup photos of Frost as a young man.)

 

Hello. I’m not Robert Frost. My name is John Lehman and we’ll be spending the next hour and a half  together. Some of you may remember seeing Robert Frost on television or in a movie in your high school English class. I was familiar with him that way too, but that never meant much to me until my wife and I made a car trip out East a few years ago and we stopped at a place he once owned: Franconia Farm.

 

It was in the fall. We found it in a book on various author’s homes. When we pulled in, there were no cars or people, just this humble wood house.

A makeshift sign said it was closed, but we decided to stay awhile.

 

I stepped up onto the slanting wood porch and peered through the panes of ripple glass. What I saw was a table…

 

(John points over at the table on stage.)

 

 …and two chairs. The barest of interiors. Then I turned away and looked out to see what Robert Frost would have seen through the window, …

 

(Dramatically, stepping forward and looking directly at the audience.)

 

…a mountainside of trees, in flaming October colors swaying in the wind. His life and his work are full of those dramatic contrasts. Let me give you one, incredible example, which you probably don’t know.

 

(John takes off his jacket and hangs it on the coat rack. He dons a black button- up knit sweater, then grabs a book and heads over to the stool where he begins to read.)

 

Here’s part of a poem by Galway Kinnell about Frost reading at Kennedy’s Presidential Inauguration:

 

I saw you once on the TV,

Unsteady at the lectern,

The flimsy white leaf

Of hair standing straight up

In the wind, among top hats,

Old farmer and son

Of worse winters than this,

Stripped in the first dazzle

 

Of the District of Columbia,

Suddenly having to pay

For the cheap onionskin,

The worn-out ribbon, the eyes

Wrecked from writing poems

For us—stopped,

Lonely before millions,

The paper jumping in your grip,

 

And as the Presidents

Also on the platform

Began flashing nervously

Their Presidential smiles

For the harmless old guy,

And poets watching on the TV

Started thinking, Well that’s

The end of that tradition,

 

And the managers of the event

Said, Boys this is it,

This sonofabitch poet

Is gonna croak,

Putting the papers aside

You drew forth

From your great faithful heart

The poem.

           

In that moment when the whole world was anxiously waiting on the edge of its chair, he came through.

 

(Pause, John stands and shakes his head.)

 

 

Or so it seemed. But, here’s what really happened.

 

 

(Smiling)

 

The presidential election of 1960 was perilously close, with Kennedy and Nixon dividing the electorate almost evenly in half. Frost balked at the prospect of a Nixon presidency, preferring the debonair, highly cultivated senator from his own neck of the woods. It was Congressman Stewart Udall who suggested to Kennedy that Frost read a poem at his inauguration. It would focus on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture. Furthermore, Kennedy had long admired Frost, but his initial response was, “No, you know Frost always steals any show he is part of.”

 

Anyway, Frost worked on a new poem, simply called “Dedication.” He was unhappy with it, even as he rushed to finish it the night before the Inauguration.

 

The next day—one hour into the big event—Frost was called forward. He ambled slowly to the podium, then fumbled for a while with his manuscript. The light seemed to strike the page in such a way that he couldn’t see, and he said, “I’m having trouble with this.” The new Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, tried to help by shielding the page with his top hat, but Frost brushed him aside. Then he totally captivated the audience by declaiming his poem “The Gift Outright” —almost as if it were coming to him for the very first time (in fact it’s one he had written two decades earlier, recited by heart dozens and dozens of times). 

 

He concluded: “…Such as we were we gave ourselves outright…To the land vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become.” The crowd roared.

 

Decades later, Americans who watched the ceremony on television still recall the hoary-haired figure in the black overcoat who put aside the script he could not read to recite from memory in his folksy, New England farm manner. Frost’s fame zoomed. People on the street suddenly recognized him. He could not go into a restaurant without someone asking for an autograph or wanting to shake his hand. And, sure enough, the day after the Inauguration, true to Kennedy’s prediction, the front page of the Washington Post headlined: Robert Frost in his natural way stole the hearts of the Inaugural crowd.”

THE WRITER’S CAVE – PART 6

 

  

JOHN:   QUESTION: Can writers fly?

 

     Despite being able to leap effortlessly from one subject to another, writers are not bats, but if they are on some kind of flying device like a plane or a helicopter, yes writers can fly. 

 

You are what you dream.  “You Are What You Dream” is the name of my short story I wrote last year, let me read it to you.

 

John grabs a sheaf of papers. He begins to read

 

You Are What You Dream

 

     When the twice-divorced John Larkin introduced himself at a downtown business card exchange to an attractive woman easily fifteen years younger than he was, he surprised himself by saying his name was “Jack.”

 

     She had a million dollars worth of tortoiseshell-colored hair, a soft, serious face and teeth that were even and strong and very white. She wore a faux fur jacket and skin-tight leather slacks. But her most unusual feature was one he could not see.   

 

     John Larkin suddenly remembered twenty-five years earlier, on the first day of boot camp.  A man waiting in line, Skip, had introduced himself to John and John had given his name, “John Larkin.” Moments later when they were joined by two other new soldiers, Skip had told them John’s name was “Jack.” He probably had had a friend, John, who went by “Jack” or perhaps—this was only a few years after the presidency of John F. Kennedy—he thought that this nickname was universal. It wasn’t. But instead of correcting him, John thought, “Why not be Jack.” It had a tough, aggressive ring he liked. Rash.  And so for the month and a half of crawling under barbed wire, breaking-down and re-assembling weapons and out-of-control binge drinking every Friday night he was “Jack.” He could have been sent to combat in Vietnam. He even hoped he would be. But when reporting to his subsequent hospital administration position in Kansas, “Lieutenant John Larkin,” was the name written on his assignment orders. It once again seemed right.

 

     That’s why, so many years later it was strange he would say his name was “Jack.” But then he thought, as he had before, “Why not?” He knew the consequences of being “John”—the nothing person everyone dumped on. For once he wanted to be the guy who grabbed what he wanted. This was his first mistake.

 

     Perhaps she was hearing impaired or had been born with deficient vocal chords, but the volume and tone of her voice was like she was holding her nose when she talked, or pronouncing words she’d never heard anyone else say. It was the voice of a cat that had somehow learned to speak

 

     Cats are my business, she said. “Cass aaaa maaa bizzzz-nesss.”

 

     “I’m a dog person myself…” Jack was self-conscious. At first he had been embarrassed by the unexpected peculiarity of this woman’s speech, now he was trying to show he wasn’t. As he looked over the business card she had offered him, this was the best he could come up with. “Though it’s not that I don’t like cats. I do. But I’ve never had one myself. And I’ve never heard of a cat spa.”

 

     Then a strange thing happened. It was as if she were a silent-screen actress and the ballroom was flickering in black and white. Words, sound, didn’t seem to matter. It was the look in her large eyes. It was seduction.

 

     In his movie version it would have meant getting a room here at the hotel, ordering a bottle of champagne, peeling apart the crisp sheets and getting cozy under the covers of a king-sized bed. But Jack found himself in her feature, pulling out of the Sheraton’s parking lot as they headed to the address of the Meow Spa and Cat Salon off of East Washington Avenue.

 

     He smiled, remembering the old Steve Martin joke about how his cat enjoyed being bathed…though the hard part was getting the hair off your tongue afterwards. Maybe there was something kinky going on, but Jack was too horny to care. He wanted to press this little prize into the corner of a leather couch in the spa waiting room and pump the hell out of her while from cages in the other room cats in heat yowled.

 

     The Meow Spa and Cat Salon was located in the old Humane Society building. Jack had been there once when his Norwegian Elk Hound wandering in the park had been picked up by the police. They had not called him and Jack had been frantic. Then the next day, to release the dog, the Humane Society was demanding he pay for its overnight stay. Jack had argued, “You never phoned me he was here. In fact I called and no one knew anything about my dog, Orson Wells.”

 

     “The dog was riding in the back of the squad car most of the afternoon,” the suddenly attentive woman behind the desk had tried to placate him.

 

     “Humane Society, hah. What a joke. You people aren’t good for anything except killing animals!” he’d screamed, and they had dropped the overnight charges.

 

     But that rage was still there, Jack realized, as they pulled in front of the out-of-way building along the railroad tracks. All parking spaces for the Meow Spa and Cat Salon were empty.

 

     She unlocked the front door and ushered him in. There was a small lamp lit on the ultramodern reception desk, the rest of the room was resplendent in art-deco shadows. There was no couch.

 

     Here’s what they teach you in the army, it’s called “An Estimate of the Situation.” Take stock of your surroundings, assess your existing resources, set priorities, act decisively, evaluate results. OK, Jack thought, there is no couch but the building seems to be empty of other people. Bang her and leave. Don’t even think about this after it’s over. However, one question did gnaw at Jack: How had she gotten to the business card exchange without a car?

 

     The woman stepped over to a large metal door. She let her faux-fur jacket dangle and fall to the floor. Then she began to unbutton her blouse. Jack felt like he was again watching a black and white movie—but now it had become one of those ancient porn booths where you inserted a nickel and a pulsating Parisian beauty stripped off her clothes. In that moment this woman seemed to unleash all the wild desire he’d ever felt. She kicked off her shoes and was stepping out of her black-leather pants. There was a skulking, feline quality to her movements as she pulled one leg then the other free. She caressed herself and looked directly at Jack. He was staring at her breasts and at that inviting patch of fur between her legs.

 

     That’s when he did something stupid—his second mistake. He hurried out of his own clothes as if he and she were two animals preparing to mate in the woods. And when he saw that Mary Pickford-look of slight alarm cross her face, he felt himself grow hard as a dog’s bone. But before he could reach over to touch her, she had opened the steel door to the back.

 

     Beckoning to him with her outstretched finger she slowly slipped out of view.

 

     Jack, completely nude, followed her. Mistake number three.

 

     When the door shut behind him, he felt a moment of panic. He was in some kind of hallway and it was completely dark. But he could hear footfalls of the little tease ahead of him and he had already seen all of her body he needed to.   

 

     The end of the corridor. Then there was a ninety-degree turn right. Down this hallway he became aware of metal bars on either side of him. He heard breathing.

 

     “Uuuuu arrrr  wha yrrrrrrr dreeeeam,” her strange cat-like whisper seemed to summon him. He sensed he was standing in the entrance to some kind of enclosure. As he stepped forward he heard its door clang shut behind him.

 

     War, to those who have never experienced it first hand, seems to be about noble causes. They imagine the soldiers who participate as exhibiting valor. But only people at a distance have the luxury of such sentiments. For men going into battle it is something else. Something less noble. Less rational.  Something more real.

 

     The fluorescent lights blinked on. Jack saw he was in a barrack of naked men, like dogs in cages, smelling death.

 

JOHN:

 

     So what happened?

 

     It’s over. You’ve arrived.

 

     Where?

 

 

He reveals the last sign: THE WRITER’S CAVE

 

     The Writer’s Cave. Now we’re ready to begin.

 

 

END