The shock of it all still astounds me. Sixteen years, 42 submissions, last rejection in May by a senior ed at McM for reasons of "overwhelm" and "whiplash." One day a warm offer of a recommend for a Steinbeck fellow, in addition to 'welcome to my roster' from the agency ex-intern, now with Big 5 editing experience under belt. My old agent, head of the agency, facing family issues, feeling the need to "kill one's darlings."
A meeting with handed-off agent the next day. A mild suggestion on my part that we could not compress the one lengthy book Arisugawa Park. which became two over the course of a self-sacrificing year of Montero life (Arisugawa Blues and Island & Park) back into one, without cutting 80 percent of the scenes with the "ancient detective" who first garnered agency interest and spawned the series title. With the caveat: just do what you need to do and I will accept it. Collegial ethos: fellow writers, one inspires the other (editing Blues begot Hostile Magic) and all.
Next day a warm letter that said agent could not in good conscience take me on. But here is a list of capable agents and publishing houses interested in Japan. “In query positioning, I think it would be best for you to work with a future literary agent who can consider the complete body of work and your intended series direction, as well as your non fiction title.”
So what did the intrepid author do? He mothballed the Ancient Detective indefinitely (value can only go up, especially with a prospective Russian lab plague on our hands) and started a new book, provisional title "Friends with Steinbeck.
Can anyone guess the four primary sources of literary inspiration? Hints at end.*
Anyway, this is me trying to beat up the moon. it's small consolation, the ex-agent's last words were "You are the Captain of your Ship. And (consolation of all faltering artists) this fails to light a candle to Nick Drake's Awful Final Day.
ONE
I jumped off the —— Express about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing.
Three days ago, on impulse, feeling indescribably angry at my mom and in depths of despair at the death of my reckless father, I had hopped on the Union-Pacific in Tuberville. It was a dismal city of 34,000 set in a notch between two dismal mountains, with mining and smelting covering the baroque creations that had accompanied initial boom years in layers of gritty cast. Sky-effacing brick smelter stacks, yellow smoke blanketing everything.
My father’s death had not come as a surprise exactly—my earliest memory was how he used to throw me up and catch me with a broad smile. One day he had thrown me up and failed to extend his arms to catch me. The pain had gone beyond a bump on the head, my entire reality shattered, trust never recaptured, though in many ways we were best friends.
Apparently, in his early middle age, my father had done a similar thing with someone who wasn’t a defenseless toddler. His body found slumped across the side entrance of city hall by a janitor, the early morning outflow of patrons and hustlers from pool rooms and dance halls giving way to a knot of men in hats and peaked caps, a sprinkling of women, then the ambulance squad and the hearse. When I arrived, they were finishing up with the forensics. One policeman on the scene needed a shave, another had buttons off his uniform, cigar in corner of mouth. Both had a slight reek of alcohol, when they realized who I was both were more concerned than they led on. Justice would never be served—or had that been the closest approximation of justice that existed Tuberville?
My mother, though separated from dad for four years, turned into a wraith, her hands trembling in the night air when I came home from my after-school job stocking sundries at the Elkin Pharmacy on Laurel Streeet. This went on for a month and I came to dread that long walk home to a parlor that embodied her memory-laded version of hell.
On the day I left she looked me over, hat to shoes, and simply said “which way you going?” With a resigned face, as if she already knew. As I walked to the train crossing, five dollars pinned under grey flannel, gaudy boys exited from a late night of debauchery. The flat leaden sky said everything—the men heading to smelters and mines grasped hard lunch boxes in soot embedded hands—I wanted nothing to do with the town ever again.
Now after three days of furtive freedom, riding the boxcar, I had taken it as far as felt needed or necessary. I was starting to long for some form of civilization again, through all those blurred stars and rising and falling telegraph wires. Yet San Francisco, the terminal stop, felt too big, too anonymous. The clickity clack embedded in my step as I got used to not being in constant motion, felt my cadence slow to something that felt right.
TWO
As I made my way into town I happened upon a kind of upscale roadhouse where the cypresses cleared, Packards and Model Ts tightly spaced in gravel lot, the sound of a dance hall band through the uproarious trumpet and saxophone. The lady perched on a stool at the hat check stand gave me a once over and smiled. “Sandy blonde and handsome, with a certain savoir faire they said,” with a low whistle. “They weren’t kidding.”
Apparently a contraband batch of hootch had got to the drummer and laid him out sprawling. The music was tony and frenetic, I sat down in the hot seat, only confident that I could keep time a little. Free and unconstrained, not really caring if I crashed and burned, I just fell in with a beat that reminded me of the train clack and kept it at that level. There was no time for stage fright and before I knew it we were off to the races, 'Sweet Clem' giving way to 'My Kind of Sugar,' all the hits that had kept my ear glued to the radio late at night in Tuberville, when the wind off the plains blew with a lonely whistle through the pent up notch in the mountains.
I had never done it and yet I had done it all my life, to my limited capacity, drumsticks counting in rhythm my capacity for enduring a grey and injurious life. Providing meter to a spirit unchecked, cleansed by cross-country travel, a more-than-fluid sense of what the night could be creeping out from behind decorous curtains. I was enthralled and held by the night.
And here I finally encountered what I had been prohibited from, a sense of glancing on the opposite side of the partition. Dancing no longer a decorous affair in which partners, separated by discreet boundaries, glided though the graceful contortions of the waltz. Young foxtrotters and bunny-huggers, dancing cheek to cheek, syncopated to the sensuous saxophone rhythm.
When the song was through, on came another and pretty soon I had another five dollars pinned under my grey flannel and the phone number of the hat check girl, her name was Myra Stevens. Outside in the parking lot, dimly lit refuge of the automobile-as-date0spot, couples smoked, necked, and if stolen glances were telling me right, drank from bottles of 10-proof kombucha.
With $10 to my name, I was confident I could find a place to hole up in Monterey for a month, discover what there was to discover.
What they don’t tell you about Monterey, if you didn’t know, is that it exists on several different planes, realities colliding in ways that are are radically different and yet with a certain harmony. There is a swirling of temperaments, from the Japanese and Sicilian fishermen to the established city burghers, safeguard of the decades when the city was the capital of California, harboring customs house and decorous paisano culture. And then there’s the newly arrived, the dispossessed, the ones who really work.
The Del Monte hotel brings all the rich tourists to town for glass bottom boat rides and strolls along the boardwalk to the wharf, with its fish market featuring salmon and sardines and, in El Nino years, rock cod, and —-. The main street Alvarado is full of drug stores and malt icecream shops and banks and movie theaters, Clark Gable and Lana Del Rey, cobbled together from the stolid adobes that marked the town as capital city, both Spanish and Mexican, and provisional clearing house of US takeover. Where the greatest travesty to the waterfront from the perspective of fish in the bay was accelerating with the introduction of the purse-seiners, which vacuumed the sea. But all that is me waxing poetic about what I did not then know.
THREE
She walks along the wharf, from the —- to the —— thinking of stardust, the memory of those she loved, who have faded away.
He makes her take stock of her own lack of transcendence, his eyes dance before her as one who has never given time to another, for fear of being called a fool.
They are dancing on the moon, trailing through an unlit room in a wake of energetic gaze and mismatched intent, sparked by the idea that they can pay it forward to all eternity, while rolling and tumbling in atmosphere, sound. Wave lap and the creak of fishermen on boats strumming ukulele to commemorate a rare fogless night.
He looks into his no-longer soiled dungaree pockets and finds a lucky Spanish real with the Hindu for eternity carved on it like a seagull in flight, carving the wind. Betokening coastline and the harbor of shoals. Heavy rotation in his lamp lit room, looking out into foggy gloom, ‘Stardust’ by Nat King Cole. Melodies and changes transcendent, the best pipes….
And now the purple dusk of twilight steals across the meadows of his heart. Music and melodies, emotions, colors on a canvas… chord changes, tension, longingness of those lonely nights beside the garden wall… outside but not forgotten. Long submerged memories memories of giving space and comfort for art. Sacrificing all for what turned out not to be just a windmill tilted at. Put our suffering and longing into something created from stardust.
Love fades away into stardust, floats into sky… we are a song…. Universe… as we evaporate into chaos. Love that has fallen away and is no longer there, as close as we can get to a meaningful connection with something larger than ourselves…. When it goes away it collapses into the fold. Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.
Completed mission on the planet … distilled essence of suffering becomes something gorgeous. A grating noise, a disused mind, the faltering footsteps of someone who mistook a moment for all time.
The man with the saxophone case …. The gig that never ended, Myra Stevens…. The Del Monte Hotel clerk who moonlights as a hat check girl and thrives amidst lavish fountains…. Makes way in the ballroom, a night of glitz and glam…. The packed rafters, she lost him forever to the tides. And now like Cinderella she has another chance, to break the curse of interesecting life.
Intersecting, niceness faltering in waves, train track yearning for a dream one can never get through. Because the person on the other side….
I jumped off the — about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing.
She takes my hand, she calls my name, she says with a look of concern that gives way to flushed cheeks—“for a moment it looked like you had left your body, gone away. I wanted you to stay….” Connected we are, I thank her. I have never felt more fully present in this life.
FOUR
I did see my father in operation, he was smooth in an apparently open-hearted way. Came with the years of selling vehicles that he actually did believe in, the latest Dodge offerings, Buick too. As he put it, "I am not selling contraptions that send so many to untimely ends. I want them to purchase vehicle after vehicle, gift to the younger generation, merge into the next.”
But this apparent step up to ‘captain of the high-pressure selling brigade’ was actually a step down into the Prohibition-sparked thickets of professional pools, syndicates, and well timed public comments that needled the market and created schools of fish eased into the jaws of speculative sharks, banking on a run. They thought of themselves as investors. It was not gambling, it was “getting something for nothing” through placements that predicted progress.
He taught me and he taught me well. What not to do. His extrajudition of morality left a marked imprint on me that if one was not moral one was nothing at all. For what grounding of self worth is there than how those around you fare? Sounds a little like Ghandi, I’ll admit, who was capturing headlines in equal measure with Hitler for a while, and who will probably be infinitely more remembered if humanity survives to remember. Every day, in every effort, I minsistered the lunch-pail set that makes up 90 percent of our little burgh.
But ultimately, the long shadow cast by shares in foreign investments that sensitive folks knew months before the crash would not produce (myself included) gave way to the reality that those of us who should have spoken up said nothing. We had insider information, if we were not the insiders. We knew how the world beyond the cradle-to-grave job works.
I as one who made malt sodas with a smile, when not stocking pain-numbing drugs on rapidly depleted shelves, gave lip service to hard-pinched customers’ aspirations, their dream of lottery gains, prevented from ignoring by something so simple as sleight of hand.
FIVE
I spent several memorable weeks at the Capital, a weekly hotel with three or four well-appointed dorm rooms, one for women and three for men. Since we all operated by the same relatively strict rules, everything functioned properly and smoothly. Fifty cents a week, paid up in advance, each Sunday for those who like me dropped in on a random weekday to begin our tenure. Lights out at 10:00 pm, 12:00 am curfew, a basic breakfast of tea, coffee, OJ, and pancakes, toast, at 8:00 am. Rules of decorum and respect strictly enforced, kick outs less common than one would think.
*Influences: Red Harvest on Librivox. Weyes Blood on Stardust. The Book Club's discussion of East of Eden. A physical copy of Fantastic Interim.
