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Channel: The Crowded Room – Completely in the Dark

This Nothing Is Something

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Something2By Monday, Jan. 8, 1979, the new year had finally settled in.

“I’ll probably be summing up 1978 for as long as I can,” I wrote in my Mead Composition journal, “How quickly time flies when you don’t record it!”

So, for nearly every day in January, I worked like the devil to get it all on paper: quoting songs I’d been listening to and jotting down snatches of dialogue I’d hoped to use for The Crowded Room, my high school story, quickly blossoming into a novella.

And university life was shaping up, too: party plans with fellow Mound graduate Geoff Morrison, and a new face in the crowd named Steph Pinsky. Taking the same liberal arts symposium with me, held Thursdays in the Architecture Building, Room 35, Steph—a “cute, black-haired, pretty-eyed freshman” who liked photography and writing, theater and dance—had turned my head. “I plan to find out more about her next session.”

By mid-January, I’d begun assessing old high school friends, camp friends, girlfriends—anyone, I wrote, “who knows me well with their experience, of course, someone who I have known for over two years.” Topping the list was Lisa Tepley, “the closest girl who could ever be ‘my wife’—I would say I love her for everything she is but, to be a realist, that does not matter to her at this time; she is extremely happy with her boyfriend Pat, at Cooper High, and we have little to say outside our own selfish experiences.” Odd that I went from first to third person in 60 seconds flat—an emotional-distancing habit, I suspect, to preserve my 19-year-old ego.

Then, on Friday, Jan. 12, this entry, in its entirety:

You wouldn’t believe the conversation I’m tuned into, such bold characterization, such touching realism! A couple and another cynically expressed girl are holding a vocal conversation. It’s interesting due to the fact that there is conflict involved, contrast. The couple seems mild-mannered, gentle, quiet. Our solitary speaker of cynicism holds center stage. Each witticism is direct, cutting, but it is, from my standpoint, moreso revealing. She gave a tremendous monologue about being ‘an old maid’ and she could have won an Academy Award for it. The conversation is dramatically perfect. It started out all of them talking about Accounting and ended with a re-cap of that topic. Perfect. After our lady of cynicism left to get a candy bar, the couple started in talking about her faults and problems: ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ Beautiful. I’ve got an idea for a play about it, expand. Life can be melodrama or farce. The tragedy is the unspoken life.

Between schoolwork and writing, I’d found a groove getting it all down in the journal. I knew where I wanted to be, but had to keep playing the role of college freshman, commuting to campus with Dad, and hoping to date young women like Steph. However, cracks were beginning to show in the façade of the devoted young scholar.Something1

For example, on Jan. 25: “I wish I could buy a van—save up a lot of money—buy needed supplies, and take a few good books, i.e., Steinbeck, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, D.H. Lawrence, a little Conrad, Camus—and a dictionary, thesaurus, and a Bible, and head off to the Mountains and read and write, and read and write, and get the kind of education I should.”

The Family Project was pressuring me to get a new job to pay tuition after I’d gotten laid off at Tonka Toys. So I applied as a janitor at Augsburg Fortress Publishing House, and interviewed there the same day as that previous Thoreauesque entry.

By the end of January, I was working 3:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., staying downtown after classes and taking the late bus home after I’d swept Augsburg Fortress floors and mopped bathrooms with some guy named Mark.

On Jan. 30, I gave over one whole journal page to a single sentence.

“this Nothing is Something.”



Already Gone

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When you’re not entirely sure where you’re going, it’s hard to see where you really are.AlreadyGone

Friday, Feb. 2, 1979, I skipped classes (and, later, my night shift at Augsburg Fortress Publishing House) to help fellow grad Geoff Morrison plan a Saturday party at his folks’ place.

Geoff was a witty kid from the only black family in my high school, now packed into a dorm room on the university’s West Bank, Middlebrook Hall. As a freshman at the University of Minnesota, I was still living at home with the Family Project. Geoff’s parents were away for the weekend. It being mid-winter, we kids decided it was time to play.

So we jumped in fellow Moundite Steve Pletsch’s Saab, stopped at the Middlebrook cafeteria where we ate lunch with “Renee, Kathy and another girl, real cute, who told me Yes [was] coming to town in March.” I noted the mystery girl’s name as “Lisa,” but later learned I had gotten it wrong. She was Thérèse Williams, a mousy brunette from St. Louis, Missouri. We told the girls about the party, urging them to drive out to Geoff’s house the following night. A bunch of dorm rats were onboard already. After lunch we headed back to the suburbs around a quarter to two.

Once in town we visited our old high school “to watch the Talent Show tryouts. It was pretty good—Steve, Geoff and I walked into the Crowded Choir Room, everyone was saying ‘hi’ and really surprised that two graduates strolled in. It really felt strange.” My senior prom date, Sally Olsen “waved ‘hi’ to me and that really felt nice.” Dave Rogers and his band did a cover of “Sweet Home, Alabama,” new seniors Andy Phillips and Bruce KenKnight did an impression of the Blues Brothers’ cover of “Soul Man,” and “a kid (don’t know him—sophomore) did ‘Already Gone’ an Eagles song of extremely fine caliber. He did an excellent job of it—singing and guitar.”

That unknown kid was like a totem of all I was feeling at the time—thirsting for independence.

Here I was—Big College Man—trying to impress high schoolers back at the old stomping grounds, and still not knowing where I was headed myself. Living at home didn’t help, and working downtown after classes also brought me down. The forthcoming party and new social life? Only things showing promise. Since “Lisa” had mentioned the Yes concert, naturally I wanted to ask her out. Maybe, I thought, she’d be at Geoff’s party and we could talk about it then.

Saturday I left for Geoff’s early, around 3:30 p.m., to help him set up. “When I got to his place,” the journal states, “they were just leaving to pick up the kegs. We got two 16’s of Special Export and picked up a pint bottle of vodka for the punch.” We then went to campus to pick up another kid, and told the others to cruise out to the party anytime after 7:30 p.m.

Instead of college girls Renee, Kathy and “Lisa,” a “strange cross-section of people came: burnouts, hockey jocks, the guys from school, and a few sophomores” from the high school.

Then, you could’ve hit me with a brick. In walked Michelle Berquist.

I was so happy to see her again I later wrote in the journal: “I must’ve been hanging on Michelle, but she, deep-down, didn’t seem to mind, although I know she wouldn’t admit it. She was with her friends Cindy Dorn and Penny Niccum and really looked great, and I wanted to let her know that…”

A junior guy named Chuck Ott “was too busy jokingly fawning himself at [Michelle’s] feet, while I sat there next to [her], with my arm gently around her, too drunkenly silent.”—A state which, the journal further notes, I quickly realized wasn’t doing me any good: “I had a Pizza Hut glass and every time it was empty, I filled it. Eventually I had the sense to put it down and lay off the brew.”

But Michelle had already gone, leaving with Cindy and Penny. The night seemed a little duller—still, not so much that I didn’t glean fodder for the next day’s writing session of The Crowded Room:

      The Party. How does everybody behave? How are their feelings revealed in a party situation? …A fight sequence between Keith and a girl he knows. They stand talking between themselves. Keith has a beer.

     “Bronsky wasn’t there!” she said, her mouth hanging open.

     “Don’t call me a liar, you little bitch!” Keith snorted and she started to cry.


Surfside

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02surfside_colorImagine being back at a place you haven’t been to in a long time.

Maybe it’s a classroom, a childhood home, the roof of said childhood home, or even the back piano bar of a long-gone restaurant.

The latter would be Surfside (at left and below, courtesy of Mr. Tom Rockvam)—which overlooked Cooks Bay on Lake Minnetonka, near the intersection of Commerce and Bartlett Boulevards in Mound, Minnesota. It was torn down in the spring of 1985 to make way for luxury condominiums.

Saturday, Feb. 10, 1979, the journal reads: “I drove out to Surfside and talked to Geoff for a second…” Geoff Morrison worked in the kitchen there after we graduated high school in 1978. We’d become buddies while attending the University of Minnesota that winter.

At the time, Surfside was owned by Butch Essig, brother-in-law to Geoff’s girlfriend Dannette, a lovely, whip-smart older blonde. Surfside always hosted our high school’s Homecoming pizza parties, since they could contain all the underage drinkers upstairs, away from the bar downstairs.

Early that Saturday afternoon my brother and I went to Ridgedale for haircuts. “Everybody was there,” the journal states. “Brian and I ran into Sara Beck and she told me that Darla just had her baby yesterday and it was a boy. That was the kind of news that stunned me—” You see, Darla and I had dated when I was a senior, so she was still in high school. And having children out of wedlock was not a common occurrence, at least at our school. Brian and I ran into a lot of other kids, and I even introduced him to Steph Pinsky, my love interest from the U, who was shopping “at the Shirt Shack.”

Once home again, I was back to writing The Crowded Room and knocking back some vodka. No mention in the journal of where the rest of the Family Project was at the time, but the folks may’ve been out of town. “I got tired of rotting around the house pretty loose, so I got in the car and went up to the Burger Chef, went by, [but] there was absolutely no one there.”01surfside_color

It was then I decided to check in with Geoff at Surfside. He finished his shift at 11:00 p.m., and was planning to hit a party. Did I want to stop back and join him? Surfside had a back piano bar that only regulars knew about—I’m certain I got the initial scoop on it from Geoff. The piano bar was just past the restrooms, the doors of which were labelled “Inboards” and “Outboards.”

But that night I wasn’t sure I wanted to party. “I drove around some more, felt real nice going nowhere. I drove past ‘the empty field,’ stopped in by the hockey rink and watched two guys passing around a puck.”

I loved those meditative drives around town, or out on back farm roads, where I fantasized about story scenes and characters. With the radio or cassette player blasting, I was completely in the zone.

When I returned to Surfside, Geoff had already left. “I was about to call it a night when I decided to stop by the 7-Eleven one last time.”

The Spring Park 7-Eleven was the hub of high school activity any given Saturday night—the place to go when ideas were running low. “When I pulled up, Michelle was walking out after paying for some gas. I ran up and we grabbed each other, arm in arm, laughed, ‘Michelle!’ ‘Michael!’ It was really great. I put the gas in her Monza … she said, ‘I wanna read your book when it’s done!’” She had to go, since she was meeting up with her friend Julie Bialon for a midnight movie.

So, here in late October 2013, I imagine being in that space again—outside the 7-Eleven before midnight on a wintry Saturday night in 1979, energy flowing between me and Michelle—but it’s like a scene in a Michel Gondry film—no past, no future, just a present quickly dissolving even as it’s happening.

Then, the following Monday, Feb. 12, I awoke from a dream. The journal records it in full:

“…Michelle and I were lying together on her bed, on the verge of making love. It seemed that she was seducing me. Well, in the dream, her Mom walked in on us (I don’t remember her reaction—it wasn’t big). Anyway, Michelle’s ‘stepfather’ (she hasn’t one) came in on us and he was really mad, bitched us both out and I argued that Michelle’s true father, who I knew, wouldn’t have minded if we were together. The dream, the story, isn’t what’s important—it’s the idea of Michelle, how she secretly has me captivated and can play upon my emotions as she pleases.

“The dream was telling me what I already knew.”


Total Eclipse of the Heart

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So, where were you when the sun went out?Eclipse2

In North America, the last total solar eclipse of the 20th century occurred on Monday, Feb. 26, 1979. Apparently it was a big deal.

The journal picks up the story: “Eclipse. …All that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. There is supposed to be a total eclipse of the sun today at 9:35 in the morning, lasting until a little before 11:00. I’ll notice the change when I walk out of History.”

Partial Begins: Things weren’t going very well at the U. I was struggling to make it through winter quarter, and night work at Augsburg was draining. “School is really a problem,” the journal states. “I’ve got to register for next quarter today. Sunday I put my ACT loan application in the mail at Ridgedale. I absolutely can’t wait until next school year.”

You see, I wasn’t sure college was right for me. On a Liberal Arts track, I was testing the waters with courses in Medieval History, Far Eastern Art, and the late Arthur Ballet’s Introduction to Theater class. My first book, The Crowded Room, was nearing completion. The journal admits it was “all I care about doing,” and that I was about “to begin the first rewrite of the entire book. It is closing in on eighty pages now.”

EclipseDark2Totality: Here today, gone tomorrow. Michelle had become an idle obsession: “Can’t stop thinking about Michelle. …Something there, I know, or am able to know. The Past still thunders. Only the Future knows why.”

The thing is, I was chickening out. There’s no indication in the journal that I even attempted to ask Michelle out after the Sno-Daze party. I was content to just live with the memory—in case anything should come along and shatter it.

Perhaps love, at 19—looked at directly—was just too intense an experience, something that needed to be approached with caution, respect and, maybe, time. I was content to put any feelings I was having into the characters of my story, such as protagonist Jeffrey Dunne’s growing alienation from his girlfriend and high school peers, or his buddy Bob Ruskin’s overall awkwardness and bad luck with girls.

Partial Ends: The following day’s entry opens, “The eclipse was disappointing. What eclipse?” As I waited for the downtown bus at 9:00 a.m., high school pals Dave Rogers, Chad Moore and Vince Marshall drove by and stopped. They were going to Chanhassen to pick up Dave’s guitar, so I hopped in. They dropped me off at the West Bank, where I got to Theater just in time.Eclipse2

That afternoon I swung by Middlebrook Hall to see if Geoff Morrison was in, but he’d already left for lunch. I thought to wait around for him, but realized that cute girl from St. Louis, Missouri—whose name I thought was Lisa, but was actually Thérèse—was also on Geoff’s floor. Sometimes she curled up on the sofa in the student lounge, watching TV and cupping her long brunette hair back over her ear. I still had another ticket to the Yes concert and, though I’d offered it to Michelle (who said she’d “let me know”), Thérèse was the first person to mention it to me. And she seemed more available.

As February 1979 wound down, the journal entries became more bizarre: “Descartes never went to high school in the ’70s. All that you touch and all that you see. Rolling Stones. So what. Lily and the Jack of Hearts. Queen of Hearts is your best bet.” Clearly I was bored with school, dulled by factory work and entirely confused about who I really wanted to date.

And I was anxious to finish The Crowded Room before March ended. Maybe the oddball journal entries were a way to blow off steam. I don’t know.

“Mary had a little lamb.
Everywhere, it went.”


Better Luck Next Time

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BetterLuckCITDA friend recently asked how organized I had to be to write this blog. While I do develop an editorial slate, I’m comfortable having posts fall out of order depending on, well, serendipity.

You see, serendipity is nearly a religion for lazy piddlers like me. It often leads to delightful discoveries.

Like the one I made last week.

On Wednesday I got a bee in my bonnet about selling some books I no longer read. Of course that involved sorting and flipping through them just to make sure I wasn’t leaving stray dollar bills, bookmarks, or odd papers stuffed between pages. In a paperback titled Plot Outlines of 101 Best Novels, somewhere between H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds) and Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), I found a real treasure, one that made me gasp—a missing letter from our old family friend, the late Mr. Tom Harrison of Olney, Maryland.

Tom Harrison was an elderly British expat who lived next door to us in Maryland, and who I befriended when I was 10 or so. He loved reading and books. When he discovered I did too, and wished to be a writer, he sent me encouraging letters after our family had moved to Minnesota.

He was the erudite grandfather I never had.

The letter was dated Tuesday, Jan. 16, 1979—all the more astonishing since that’s the time period I’m currently covering in this blog. That, my friends, is the hallmark of serendipity: it’s like the Universe is giving you a nudge just when you seem to need it most.

He begins by apologizing for not writing sooner, but it’s likely I was buried in my own new-to-University-life angst and hadn’t thought of him for quite a while, at least since receiving his congratulatory letter after I graduated high school. Seems he understood that. “I can appreciate fully,” he wrote, “the uncertainties and apprehensions which are assailing you about your future career. … Don’t think about it but immerse yourself in your studies and determine to be on top.”

The letter brims with word etymologies and musings on Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian languages and their influences on English. He knew I was already a curious kid, but he liked to prod me: “Never, NEVER in your reading skip a word which you don’t understand. Look it up.”

He mentioned being curious about my family’s pedigree, using Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin as an example. “It is possible,” he wondered, “that you had an ancestor who lived in a spot which had some poor pine trees and the neighbor called him ‘Jacques or Jean of the poor pines’—mau pine. One bad pine would be mal pin of course. The plural gives the mau.”

In our correspondence we shared favorite authors. He read Galsworthy, Browning, Wells, and Stevenson. “You like Steinbeck,” he wrote. “O.K. So do I.” His latest find was John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, which he highly recommended.

Then the hammer came down—just like that.

You see, after completing The Crowded Room in 1979, I was off on new writing projects: a short story about trolling the Hopkins main drag for love, tentatively titled “The Heart-Shaped Night”—and some really, really awful poetry. Apparently proud of what I’d written, I’d sent him some, one of which must’ve been a rehash of a longer poem I’d begun in high school, “The Golden Ring.” It reeked of vagueness and sentimentality. Mr. Harrison knew he had to approach his criticism with a deft surgeon’s touch. “I hope that so far,” he wrote, “I have been encouraging. From now I’m going to slap you down.”

He had many questions. “It has rhythm, it has rhyme…” But it lacked sense and meaning. “I have no doubt that you had a clear idea of what you wanted to say, but you failed to convey it to your reader and if the reader had been your publisher, what chance would you have had?”

No recollection of how I took that—probably by realizing I wasn’t cut out for poetry; I wrote very little afterward.

But as a young writer I was hugely influenced by Mr. Harrison. I needed to hear what he had to say, exactly when he said it. “It seems to me,” he concluded, “that you have sacrificed sense to rhyme and rhythm, and that won’t do. Better luck next time.

“I’m sorry to have to say that, Michael, for I really wish you well.”

Thank you, Mr. H., truly. Thank you for everything.


The English Teacher

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“…I still didn’t have the paper done, God, it was bugging the hell out of me anyway. I always screw things up really bad in that class, and MacHardy even kinda bugs me. He’s always picking things apart, you know, analyzing too much. I suppose a teacher’s gotta be consistent or something or else parents would be curious, about his competency, I mean.”   —Jeff Dunne, “The Crowded Room”

EnglishTeacherThey were the enemy.

They were the ones creating all the stress, the assignments—and doling out those dreaded grades.

And while that may be putting it a tad strongly, they were on the other side of the fence from us kids. Especially us nerdy ones.

I almost never think about the teachers in my life, but I did just recently.

You see, my high school English teacher (and student newspaper advisor) Paul McHale died on July 14. He was 82 years old.

I’ve mentioned him a couple times in early posts of CITD. But it wasn’t until I’d read his obituary that I realized I never really got to know the man.

After all, Paul McHale was probably 45 years old when I was in his Advanced Composition class at Mound Westonka High School (photo above, left, from 1978). Back then 40-anything was old. I mean, as old as my parents old.

And like parents, teachers were the kind of people that any teen needed to view with the utmost circumspection. It was simple: they could rat on you at any second! So it was always best to keep them at arm’s length.

Still, I’d gotten off on a good footing with teachers all the way back to elementary school in Maryland. Then, once I’d moved to Minnesota, there was my Grandview Junior High School English teacher, Rhys Evans. He was a real character.

When we arrived for class, he was always sitting at an upright piano in the room. He’d play ragtime and jingles (that he claimed he’d written himself); one in particular was titled “Queenie in Her Bikini.” (Try getting that past the school board today, folks.)

Mr. Evans had slicked-back dark hair and glasses with thick black frames. Class never formally began until he stopped playing the piano, closed the keyboard lid, and sauntered over to the lectern.

Our assignments were usually due by the next class. Since I was already creating short stories on my own, I loved writing “descriptive narratives” or “dialogue between two characters.” One such assignment came back with a bright red A+ and a note at the bottom: “You have a talent, Mike, a gift for expressing yourself with words. Keep developing it. I know you will make good use of it for pleasure as well as for your work. You have some fine writing here for an 8th grade assignment.”Eide_English

Mom proudly affixed it to the refrigerator, where it stayed probably well into my high school freshman year.

The positive reinforcement continued with a junior-year class called “Literature in the Real World” with Duane Eide. Eide assigned us a personal narrative, so I wrote about a snowy walk out on frozen Lake Minnetonka to an abandoned cabin, where my brother, a friend and I found some old tintypes. “Your descriptions are vivid and interesting,” Eide wrote. “Your last short sentence really gives your narrative a clear purpose!”

However, once I’d made it to senior year, McHale raked my writing over his searingly hot editing coals—something I thoroughly resented.

***

Jack_EnglishTeachI needed some insight into what may’ve been going on, so I interviewed Jack Schlukebier, a retired St. Paul Central High School English teacher.

I’m grateful Jack took the time to talk with me. We chatted on the front porch of his Summit Hill home on Wednesday, Aug. 5.

Taking puffs from his pipe, he said that 10th and 11th grade is a critical period for kids’ writing. His statement really surprised me, so I asked him to explain.

“It seems,” he said, “like that’s when it’s either the maturity or experience, or it’s the kind of literature you’re reading, that’s when it gels for those who are going to really get into it. By senior year, I never saw much development—saw a lot of refinement, maybe … but kids then are going to catch on to [metaphors]—well, English teachers love metaphor. We just think that’s the coolest thing in the world. That’s when it sort of catches on. They’ve been using them all their life, but they don’t understand … by senior year everything is more mechanical.”

I explained to him how criticism from McHale weighed so heavily on my mind at the time. “You needed that affirmation from the right guy,” he said flatly.

But I was only a kid! It’s easy to forget what it’s like under a teenager writer’s skin. Jack gave me the view from the business side of the chalkboard:

“The other thing I’ve noticed in high school writing, and it was true in junior high … there’s so much angst. You know, and self-pity. These kids would do personal narratives, just reams of paper about how the world is screwin’ them. And they just can’t see past that. When it came to expository writing, or even trying to write a fictional piece, many students could never become somebody else—you could tell it was always about them. And being able to develop a persona, as a writer, for your story, is kind of a difficult concept.”

I asked him how a teacher could best help a young writer develop a persona, get into the skin of a fictional character. Could it be through emulating a writer who’s already doing that?

“I think you hit it,” Jack said. “The kids who are good writers—and I think this is true for adults, too—are avid readers. You’ve got to get outside of yourself and into another character in a book or place. And when you can do that, then I think you can write. But the kids who were not good readers … I mean, they could put together a simple sentence but it never became a character—or something other than their angst,” he laughed, “My God, the angst! Give me a break.

***

LastPaulMcHaleIn one of my last Advanced Composition classes, McHale sent back a descriptive narrative I’d written about the first date with my high school girlfriend Kim—finally with an A-.

“You show a sharp eye for detail,” he noted on the back of the assignment. “Your style is not opaque at all—it’s most transparent. I enjoyed your paper.”

Whew. You really ran me through the mill, Mr. McHale.

And I wish I could’ve seen you one last time.

Just to tell you how grateful I am that you did.


Rediscovering Dumond

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The year was 1989.

How did it change the course of my life?

I can’t quite go there without first examining what lead up to it. I last left off at 1986 and ’87—terrible, terrible years.

Turns out, after examining my journals going into 1988, things didn’t improve, although my intentions were more solid. A couple posts can be gleaned from ’88 that, hopefully, make things clearer.

So, where to begin?

The old 1986-’87 journal announces an end-of-year “ongoing essay,” explaining the dilemma at the time:

“…this journal [has] been a bit of a pariah with me and I figured that if I want to keep a journal for 1988, I’d like to start out fresh (I already have the book in my possession). After all, this book was begun in January 1986—two years later and I still wouldn’t finish it until, at the earliest, the middle of 1988, judging by the ‘speed’ with which I’d ‘attacked’ it before. This ‘ongoing essay’ is really intended to be rather open—the point is to write stuff, fill these pages, and maybe through the process of writing think about the things I’ve refused to think about in 1987, [though] the nature of which I’ve resented, but rather than talk them out, as most people do, I shut them up, just as I’ve wished to do to others. If this essay has any sort of Topic, that’s it.”

The “taskmaster-like punishment” in the process is interesting: no joy, no felicitous self-discovery—just crack the whip and “find out who’s to blame”:

“I’d just read over some of the last entries from 1986 on and was surprised to see how short the year 1987 was in this diary! Just what the hell did I do with my time? Summer, drinking, parties (unsuccessful Kafkian adventures at best), working late til summer’s sunset (I don’t remember hearing crickets last summer) and sleep a lot of the time. Obviously, no writing…”

In the essay I recount animosities toward friends, who, I report “have little time for me. They’re all married and are in a great respect quite boring to be around. So whaddaya have?”

There’s a lot of detail into the rituals with “the boys from the office” who hit “singles bars and dance places … our minds have been pretty closed and we usually go to [the same places] rather than break new ground and go somewhere else. Reason being we’re looking for quantity of single women wherein one may find quality. It stands to reason if you go to some hick bar in Mayer, Minnesota, chances are there may be one attractive woman in the place, but among five horny and bored single guys, that just doesn’t cut it.”

“Anyway, the point is,” a “second sitting” quickly assesses, “the past year or so, we’d been beating our heads against a social wall upon which is graffitied AIDS, earning power, clever talk and power dressing. A handful of anxious yet handsome, clever yet shy, creative yet invisible guys do not an ’80s statement make. You’ve got to have ‘your label’ sticking out now-a-days, and we all, from 25 to 31, seem a little out of step. I think we’ve refused to concede. Everytime we go out, we try to make the best of the way we look by saying to ourselves: ‘Hey, so I look sorta shitty. But what a guy inside! Take me or leave me!’ Maybe that’s not a bad attitude. But in the ’80s, it’s a poor formula for ‘success.’”

Finally a “3rd Sitting” really focuses on the moment. I loved rereading it:

“All I’ll tell you is that it’s the middle of January 1988 and it’s snowing outside. Snowing hard. There’s a good possibility that, if the snow comes down all night, work may be cancelled tomorrow. I hope that isn’t the case in one great respect: I need the money. In another way, I could use the day to finish filming the stuff I have lying around from 1987. That’d be nice.”

What was this “filming”? I’d forgotten that I owned a Super 8 camera and did some time-lapse experiments with it.

Meanwhile, the essay gets bogged down in its own muck:

“Anyway, this bit about ‘1st Sitting, 2nd Sitting and so on; I don’t know. I thought—I just noticed something peculiar about the way I’m writing now—I’m rushing—scratching away with this pen like a man with a gun to his head. I know I didn’t write this way before. I recall down at school, in Iowa, I wrote in the journal like a painter stroking canvas, caressing each word on paper, relaxed. If you don’t believe me, then compare the past year’s handwriting with the handwriting around October/November 1984. I think [I’ll] break briefly to do that, and when I come back I’ll try to write slower—through sheer effort of will…”

So I did just that (photo at right, 1987, clipped page is 1984):

“Well, I think I know the answer—much was happening then, and I remember I’d felt pretty happy, even in the most anxious moments. I’ve come a long way from then. I want to try to rehabilitate myself to the ‘old ways.’ I feel I will discover Dumond in there. I noticed the 1984 handwriting was tighter, more controlled. The 1987 handwriting is rushing to fly off the page, much I suspect, as my mind had been. The hand is, after all, only the talk the mind truly understands. It says more…”

Not sure what I meant by “rehabilitate myself to the ‘old ways,’” but “discover Dumond in there” was the hope that a planned story collection, “The Dumond Stories,” a follow-up to my first novella The Crowded Room, would finally see the light of day. Funny how I was more into thinking about writing than actually doing the writing.

You know, I wouldn’t be that young person again for all the tea in China (as the saying goes).

Where was that kid headed?

And what did he really want to do with his life?


Keepsake (Part 1)

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[First part of a two-part post.]

In John Ford’s The Searchers, John Wayne’s character, Ethan, reluctantly joins a posse pursuing Comanches that have abducted his niece, Debbie, played by Natalie Wood. There’s a scene where the posse freezes upon hearing the sound of a Comanche signal. Reverend Clayton glares at Ethan; Ethan glares back.

Ethan: Well?
Reverend: You wanna quit, Ethan?
Ethan: That’ll be the day.

***

So Buddy Holly and his pals, J.I. and Joe B., are slumming around Lubbock, Texas, in 1956. J.I., known to his teachers as Jerry Allison, wipes his nose on a sleeve and kids Buddy about Buddy’s latest girlfriend, Echo. Buddy stops, looks up for a sec, then glances at a storefront window, points at the mannequin, then elbows J.I. in the ribs, snorting, “Some chick, huh?” J.I. laughs, “That’ll be the day.”

What follows is a sort of ghost story. And a complicated one at that.

I have an inkling of where it’s going, but I won’t know how it ends until we get there.

Care to ride along?

Great.

***

The fresh, new 1988 journal spells it out in a Feb. 1 entry: “A lot of hope this year, pretty much all I can say. After 1987, ’88 has to be better. I don’t think I’ve been worse than that year.”

I was two and a half years into a hateful corporate job and fidgeting around for new creative work. Along with writing and doodling, I was also interested in photography and filmmaking. In late 1986 I wrote to the local PBS station about their “Screenplay Project,” so I could pitch them an idea. I’d never written a screenplay before, but attempted stage plays as a kid. I loved the idea of “making a movie,” but lacked the experience and skills.

I knew what I really needed.

I needed a story I could disappear into.

Previously it was all about “Write what you know,” just as my teachers had instructed. So I wrote about high school and living in my hometown.

What, I wondered, would it be like to write about things I didn’t know?

How would it feel to become characters whose experiences were entirely different than my own?

That’s probably what I’d hoped for in The Dumond Stories. But I was one story in before I realized I was in way over my head, so I stopped cold.

By September 1987 I had the idea for a combination teleplay/long-form piece. It would tell the story of an aging and nearly forgotten pop musician named Dean McLeary and his creative muse—the great Buddy Holly.

***

Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1988: “I rented The Real Buddy Holly StoryPaul McCartney’s documentary on Buddy Holly. I got to see J.I. and Joe B. in the film. Hopefully I will meet them tomorrow night at Bunker’s. I talked to Jon Bream of the StarTribune on the phone. I called him to find out the Crickets’ lineup for tomorrow night. He said it would be Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, and a Gordon Paine. He wished me luck in my investigations. I’m anxious.”

You see, that previous September I made a road trip to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, to do research on a story with the working title Buddy’s Scrapbook.

The “raw writing” part would not be a script, but a straight-up short story told by the main character, pop musician Dean McLeary, and “embellished” by a “mysterious researcher” named Matt J. Durand.

This, I think, is important to the story I want to tell here, chiefly because it was the second time I’d used a pen name; my high school novella The Crowded Room was “written” by its main character, high school senior Jeffrey Dunne. Buddy’s Scrapbook was the first time I’d have one character “annotate” another character’s story. Clearly I was worried about becoming the “self-absorbed, egotistical author type.” I was trying to stay out of the story’s way.

Or so I thought.

Buddy’s Scrapbook begins with an outline of the plot:

“Dean McLeary flies into MSP airport on Feb. 6, 1975, a Thursday, from New York City. His dying mother’s partner, Chester, picks him up at the airport and takes him to his mother’s house on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue, where Dean spends an anguished night with his home-hospiced mother, sleeping in his sister’s old bedroom. There he finds some of his sister’s rock and roll memorabilia. The following morning he decides to drive to Clear Lake, Iowa, where estranged sister Nancy lives with her family. He plans to rent a car, but Chester offers him a 1964 Chevy Bel Air he’s been fixing up.”

Interposed with Dean’s story (who, by the way, was based on folk singer Don McLean, of “American Pie” fame) is Matt J. Durand’s “Model of a Binary Universe Set to Music” and his hypothesis that Buddy Holly’s life was mysteriously and inextricably linked to Bernstein’s West Side Story. It’s a stretch, but Durand makes a valiant attempt.

Meanwhile Dean “arrives in Clear Lake at Nancy and her husband Roger’s house, they have supper, drinks, and conversation around the kitchen table.” Before going to bed, Dean calls his girlfriend Missy in NYC, who’s playing Anybodys in an off-Broadway production of West Side Story. Dean decides to stay longer in Clear Lake and connects with the owner of the Surf Ballroom, where one night he takes the stage to play Holly’s “Well…All Right” to the delight of his sister and others present.

Obviously the story’s drama would work itself out “in the details.” I still have a hefty piles of notes, research, and whatnot of a draft … that never materialized.

What was going on?

What would I learn from this crazy writing process?

And would I ever finish the project?



Approaching the Frontier

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“The man with imagination but no knowledge is like a bird with wings but no feet.”

There it was—a collection of quotes stuck in my bed frame, written in the early 1970s when I was preteen.

I found them last spring while I was moving.

While it’s not particularly connected to what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is where I last left off, at the beginning of 1989: the year that probably changed the course of my life, there might some use for the old saw.

That transformation actually began the year before, even though my journal at the time devotes a mere eight handwritten pages to 1988.

An entry on Wednesday, Nov. 23, declares, “things have changed for the better, though. I’m working nights at Fingerhut as a regular staff proofreader under the ruse that I will be going back to school part time Winter Quarter. I say ‘ruse’ because that rhymes with ‘excuse’ and that’s how I’m looking at it. I like working nights—more pay, less hassle with people, solitude to get things done.”

But what’s even more interesting about the entry is the next paragraph. I touched on my relationship with Sally, a coworker at Fingerhut, adding intrigue to what I originally wanted to write about here: dealing with other people, protecting myself, yet still enjoying being in the world.

The following paragraph spills it:

“It’s ironic, also, in the last few months—when I’d written the last entry and left it there [Ed. note, back in June 1988], a few days later Sally and I had breakfast at Benjamin’s in Minnetonka, then that night she stayed with me over at the folks’ (they were out of town for a week—Indiana, I think). We saw each other for a few weekends for another month, until July 4th (the worst 4th of July in my recent memory) when I did nothing but crash out at my apartment, got drunk and phoned her at her folks’. The next day she had asked me to phone her and we ended it again. In a way I was quite relieved—she’d touched on a true point—that I was just seeing her until someone better came along. Well, I’ll admit that I’ve never been ‘in love’ with her (I’ve always seen sex and love as two completely different things: sex as bodily function, but love as a rare and special experience, one I’ll admit that I have yet to know in its complete force.”

That admission leaps out at me, revealing maybe less about how I felt about Sally and more about relationships in general.

You see, for much of my early life, it was a touchy negotiation with the outside world.

I often felt overwhelmed by the needs of others. As mentioned, my father was probably the biggest dog in the room. I’d get frustrated when my personal world was upended by his demands. From there it projected out into other spheres: school, friends and girlfriends, then later, bosses and coworkers.

I always went inward—what I now call “stargazing”—and fixed my attention on a subject, hobby, or practice that completely absorbed me. Sometimes it was art or music; other times writing or reading. The chief absorbing love was stories. Storytelling lay at the core of all my other interests. Then family or friends would then get frustrated and “rattle my cage.” I would angrily lash out, attempting to “protect my territory.”

While there’s no journal entry marking the date, one such stargazing moment happened in 1988. I’d been killing time at the Ridgedale public library when, mindlessly skimming through the racks, I pulled down a copy of Roger Manvell’s biography of the English actress Ellen Terry. On the cover was Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Terry at 16 years old, taken in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s bathroom, of all places.

Immediately I fixed on the photo—it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen! It deserved an exclamation mark! I recalled it from years before when I was thumbing through art magazines as an art department aide at Lakewood Community College.

I had to know the story behind the photo. So I checked out the book, devouring it in days.

So, on Feb. 27, 1989, I wrote in the journal: “I’ve started a draft of a screenplay of Ellen Terry’s early life in the mid-Victorian theater entitled ‘The Wandering Moon’ and I’ve set a completed draft deadline for October. In November, for about two weeks around my 30th birthday, I’m planning on visiting London again…” I’d arranged to stay with old friends Lindsay and Abi (who then owned homes in Forest Gate and Wood Green, respectively), visit museums, art galleries, and locations in the script, and do research toward a rewrite.

“If I achieve these goals (all realistic) this year,” I wrote, “Then 1989 will be the most successful year I’ve had since I graduated from high school…I haven’t had a personally satisfying success since I wrote The Crowded Room in 1979. What a start! I mustn’t let the obnoxious little black voice belittle my hopes. One step at a time! Hooray!”

Which, ironically, leads us back to the opening quote: Imagination (seeing the story in my head) was the bird with wings. It could fly, but how would it land if it had no legs?

(Answer: by writing day after day, one step at a time.)

That “obnoxious little black voice”—the thin borderline between self and others—would have to be strictly policed. I was hyper-aware of how the world would add distractions and rob my concentration.

The frontier of the imagination is always there—I know that—but it took years of figuring out how invite others into it without jeopardizing the work I wanted to finish, someday.

And time was of the essence.


The Year That Changed My Life (Part 1)

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When I don’t know where my life is going, I always lean back to the past. It just makes me feel better—like I actually came from someplace.

Last time we were here, at Completely in the Dark, it was the mid-1980s.

I’d left University of Iowa for a proofreader gig at a direct mail marketing corporation in Hopkins, Minn., where I’d moved in April 1986. It was my first-ever apartment (photo at left) and I was proud that I had a full-time job. I had benefits, a 401k (another first!), a new girlfriend, and I entertained coworkers with dinner parties and nights on the town.

It was a heady time.

Of course, heady was never enough and I crashed under the weight of it all in 1987. The Cliff’s Notes of the story include recovering in 1988, taking another shot at finishing an undergraduate degree, and changing work from day to night shift.

In 1989, the work change gave me time to write my first screenplay, The Wandering Moon, and still pay the rent. Then I set another goal: I’d return to England that autumn, the first draft in my hot little hand, and complete research on outstanding questions I had about the story—not to mention seeing the locations up close and personal.

Plus, it would be my 30th birthday.

I knew I wanted that milestone to mean more than a passage of years—it had to bring new purpose to my life.

In hindsight, it did. Big time.

It’s important for me to remember all this now because I’m at a similar crossroads.

I’ve just come off probably the hardest decade of my life, beginning in 2006 and finally turning around last year. Over that time I gained two new jobs, back-to-back, a condo home (with a mortgage!), a girlfriend, and was on a strong foundation.

Then 2008 arrived.

Both my parents died. The economy tanked. The following year, the girlfriend and I broke up; just over two years after that, left the full-time job. Everything went south, fast. The losses accumulated year after year from then on—less work, less money, finally losing my home and having to move in 2016. It was horrifying. But friends remarked my inborn Stoicism seemed to bear me through it all. Sometimes, not so much.

Now I’m seeing some exciting possibilities on the horizon, and I’m reminded of the year that changed my life—1989.

That year pushed open the door wider because I hunkered down and did the work. On the way to the office for evening shift, echoing in my head, I heard horses’ hooves clacking on cobblestone streets of 1864 London, after I’d been working on the script all day.

I had a goal for year’s end, and I made it.

I saw it was all possible.

So here’s how the journal begins telling he story of the year that changed my life:

Wednesday, 15 November, 1989. The Return to England.

Huh. What a day. It’s been absolutely dream-like. The plane got going late (7:05) and then we had a 1-1/2 hr. stop-over in Boston where we filled the plane to capacity. I sat next to a young guy from Oxfordshire named Gary and his red-headed little boy. The rest of his family (wife and daughter) were a few rows behind us. He was the first Brit I’ve showed The Wandering Moon to. He was impressed and amused.

Earlier, Hollingsworth had driven me to the airport in his newly bought used pickup truck. Traffic was backed up for miles and a snowstorm had begun. I was feeling jittery and anxious. The flight was tedious. I tried to read the script, then I tried to sleep. I dozed for about an hour, listening to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and dozing off to the hum of activity around me. That was the moment this dream journey began. I sat opposite on the aisle of the plane with a girl, blonde, early twenties, from a town outside Bath, county Avon, who was flying back home after staying with an American family in Wisconsin. She seemed very shy—in a tired way. She was also lovely. We only chatted now and then.

When the plane arrived at Gatwick, we all said goodbye—I hustled through Customs, getting pounds Sterling, then making the train to Victoria, London. It was a dizzying ride—my jet lag was extreme and I was swirling in my head just trying to stay awake. The countryside flicked by more frantically than I’d remembered it had when I took the coach in ’82. At Victoria, I struggled with my baggage as I attempted to relearn the Subway and eventually lugged my way to 6 Ladbroke Terrace. The Israeli/Iranian guy running the place had given up my room with facilities, but he had a cheaper room without, so I took it. I took a hot steaming bath down the hall as the maid made up the bed, and then the phone rang as I prepared to take a nap. It was Dan calling from Gatwick—Sharon had missed her flight out but her luggage was on its way to the US of A sans Sharon. So Dan & Sharon made plans to come up to see me in Kensington, then we’d go out shopping for a day’s worth of clothes for Sharon and, afterwards, supper. I slept for almost an hour, after which I phoned Abi (not at home) and Joy Melville (of the Ellen & Edy biography) and she was hurrying to meet a deadline, but she was interested to see the first draft of my script and we made plans to get together between Nov. 25–27 when I returned to London.

Dan & Sharon arrived at Holland Park Hotel around 6:00 and after a brief tour of my doormouse-sized bedsit, we went shopping. It was a fun evening, chatting happily with friendly London salesclerks. We gawked at all the toys and food items at Harrods. Then we had supper at a little café in Knightsbridge called “The Stock Pot”—chicken, soup, coffee, cake—they treated me to a birthday dinner. I got back to my room at around 9 o’clock & called Abi. Her boyfriend was over and she was doing his laundry. We chatted for a bit—I saying I’d see her on the 25th. London! What a cacophony of noise, sights—beautiful women! Tomorrow EARLY:

1) Get coach ticket to Tenterden

2) See “Choosing” at the Nat’l Portrait Gallery

3) Get back and packed and out of Hotel by 11:00

4) Get on bus to Kent!





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