Writerly

Up into my twenties I aspired to become a writer of favorable repute. I think these hopes were kindled in the third grade when I was assigned to write about a village. Our choices were Spooky Village, Happy Village, Silly Village, and a few others. I chose Silly Village and dashed off a page-long exposition about a community where the kids smoked cigarettes and drove cars and the grown-ups rode tricycles and played kickball. The piece garnered such resounding guffaws from the other kids that my ears are still ringing.

Let me tell you, it's tough on a guy to peak at age nine. I will forever feel a certain kinship with Rodney Allen Rippy.

I never topped "Silly Village," but for years and years I tried. These efforts weren’t always honorable. Often in my youth, desperate for ideas, I appropriated tales that were already in the public domain. One that comes to mind was the fable about the dog with the bone in its mouth. This unsatisfied hound happened upon its own reflection in a pond and decided it wanted that bone. Of course, the dog ends up with nothing but a broken heart. Feeling only the slightest pangs of shame, I put that story into a Big Chief tablet as if it were my own.

A couple years later, I planned to top "Silly Village" by publishing a sports biography. We had dozens of those cluttering our house--bios of Jerry Kramer and Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and the like. In fact, this idea was inspired by a paperback on the coffee table nearby. Called Earl the Pearl, the book chronicled the exploits of the legendary cager Earl Monroe. I figured local hero Len Dawson might be a good subject for a biography, but I didn't have his address or phone number handy, and I was really in a hurry to publish. So instead I chose Earl Monroe as my subject and began transcribing from Earl the Pearl into my spiral notebook, careful to rearrange a few words and punctuation marks to appease any uptight copyright judges.

On most weekend nights in high school, while my peers were off wasting their time dating and having fun, I sat in a recliner with a pillow on my lap and a notebook on the pillow, and I wrote in longhand for long hours. Those days, I didn't date much. I was five-eleven and weighed one-twenty. I drove a car that made the nuns laugh and point. I wore my hair in the style a friend calls “the Julie Andrews cut.” I clipped the same necktie to a polyester shirt every school day and wore cowboy boots before they were cool—back when all of Garth Brooks’ friends were in low places because they were crawling around in diapers.

On some of those nights I went for a solitary drive with the goal of immersing myself into any experience I could later write about, the way a Tom Wolfe or a George Plimpton might. This goal was conditional: I would not immerse myself into anything that might result in bloodshed, embarrassment, or harsh words from grown-ups, other teens, or outlaw bikers.

Writerly matters were always on my mind. Anything could inspire a trip to that recliner and the aforementioned pillow and spiral notebook. If the night was speckled with fireflies, for instance, or if the dusky sky had a peculiar-shaped cloud, you’d find me hard at work, incorporating such visions into a brand-new novel.

I began writing a brand-new novel just about every day, a habit I shared with Joyce Carol Oates. Unfortunately, I presumed a novel must begin at daybreak and must chronicle every move the protagonist makes. By the age of fifteen I had completely worn out every way to describe the brushing of teeth and the sizzling and crackling of bacon in a skillet.

Often I tried to build the stories around what I believed were exceptional metaphors or funny lines. For example, one evening I worked like the devil to construct a story around the simile “he’s as slippery as a bar of soap in a bathtub.”

I now recall an anecdote that sent me speeding to the writing chair. As the story went, while on a car trip in high school, an older brother and some buddies stopped for gas in the kind of sweaty southern town that might employ Rod Steiger as its sheriff. In the men’s room, a townie said to one of them, “From where we come from, we wash our hands after we piss.” And my brother’s friend said, “From where we come from, we don’t piss on our hands.”

For better or worse, I never resorted to spirits or hallucinogens to help me complete a piece of work. In college another fledgling scribbler often boasted of how liquor was an inspiration and a device. He once told me, “When I sit down to write, I got a pen in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other, and I don’t stop writing till the pen or the bottle goes dry.”

At least his approach resulted in something. He became an alcoholic.

The most important years in the development of a writer are ages fifteen to twenty, roughly speaking. During those formative years, I squandered a lot of time by emulating such raconteurs and lightweights as Hunter S. Thompson, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. And, regrettably, I enrolled in all the creative-writing workshops I could, where the prevailing advice was “show, don’t tell,” and where consensus by committee, which is always a bad idea, was driven by the blowhardiest among us.

So the fact that I’ve yet to surpass “Silly Village” is really no surprise.

Cops and Hippies

I’ve said a lot of dumb things over the years, but perhaps the dumbest came as the big finish to an oration I gave in speech class my freshman year of high school, in 1978. I concluded a speech about the police department with this Nixonian challenge: “So, if you ever need help in an emergency, try calling a hippie and see what happens.”

The incident is made doubly pitiful because the line wasn’t even mine to begin with. I had lifted it from the dictatorial Monsignor who reigned over my parish grade school. He was also the city’s police chaplain, and he spoke of cops more highly and more often than he spoke of Christ. A hundred times I heard the silvery Monsignor say this: “If I’m going thirty and I see a cop, I drop down to twenty-five. If I’m going twenty and see a cop, I drop down to fifteen. And if I’m going fifteen and see a cop, I wave him over and buy some tickets to the police circus.”

The first time I heard it, I said to myself, “Monsignor, I’m with you on the Trinity, and I’m with you on the Transubstantiation, and I’m with you on the Virgin Birth, but with this one you’ve gone too far.”

I was fifteen when I delivered to my class that encomium on the valor of police officers, but in truth I’ve always had mixed feelings about law enforcement. It seems that whenever I’m feeling somewhat positive about the thin blue line, an ugly incident shakes things up—say, Deputy Fife incarcerates a 90-year-old Burt Mustin for the crime of upsetting a board of checkers in public.

There was even a time when I considered becoming a policeman. I think what held me back was my fear of mean dogs. No doubt there’d be occasions when I’d have to run through the kinds of dark back yards where mean dogs lurk.

But I did take part in the ride-along program. It was in December of 1982 when I rode shotgun (almost literally) for an evening shift in the city’s East Zone.

The tour was eventful, at least compared to how I usually spent my nights. The highlight was a Hollywood-styled chase through hilly sidestreets. It lasted for five thrilling minutes and had everything but the sensational upsetting of a fruit stand.

The owner of the pursued vehicle had been implicated in a recent homicide. The boxy van contained a teen-aged driver who resembled the garden-variety white kids you see on “COPS,” except that he wore a shirt. His companion, though, was an anomaly: an auburn-haired pixie in a pony tail and a black sweater. Handcuffed and shivering, she stood isolated in the middle of the street for the longest time, often engaging me in eye contact, as if I had the power to free her. I certainly had the will to free her.

I was happy to see the police escort the scraggly driver into a paddy wagon; later, though, I was equally unhappy to see them escort the pretty girl into the back seat of a patrol car.

Even in the face of such ambivalent feelings about the law and its offenders, I’m never hesitant to call the police, and have done so about twenty times.

My first such call was placed while I was a grad student in another town, in 1987. I lived one floor below a most despicable fellow who happened to look just like Howie Mandel—the ridiculous 1987 version, not the ridiculous 2007 issue. Thanks to Google, I’ve since determined this ersatz Mandel was from a “connected” family back east, and therefore I’ll disclose no other details about him or his sporty red car or his Brit-model girlfriend.

This upstairs neighbor sold marijuana, but his real offenses were blasting heavy metal music at all hours and reading the Riot Act to the Brit-model—the Riot Act being the only thing this college student ever read.

After a few months of misery, I phoned the TIPS hotline and ratted him out. But it was not the weed that forced my hand; it was the noise. I say “live and let live,” as long as you don’t live too loudly near my doorstep.

I’ve been on the other end of such phone calls, so I know what it’s like to be hassled by The Man. One summer evening in the middle 1970s, my youthful buddy Tiger and I were treating whiffle-ball bats like guns, much the way today’s kids treat guns like guns. When we got tired of shooting each other, we trained these colorful cudgels at passing cars. Soon a Plymouth Fury sped our way. It was the fuzz. Someone had narked on us. Someone had mistaken our plastic bats—the type with the skinny handles and the ends that flared like Popeye’s forearms—for munitions.

The cops got to the bottom of things in just ten seconds and then departed; it was an emergency that even a hippie could have handled.

Speaking of hippies, ever since I delivered that unfortunate speech in 1978, I’ve felt the need to apologize to our shaggy friends. So, here it is: I am sorry for impugning you in front of twenty uninterested freshmen.

And, dear hippies, while I have your ear, I’d like to thank you for getting on the nerves of Spiro Agnew, John Wayne, and football’s Earl Morrall. Really, other than enabling Charles Manson and bumming too many smokes and “crashing” wherever you’d like, you’ve done humanity no harm. It’s my firm belief the world is large enough for you. But please know that my living room floor is not.

Stooges

I think I read somewhere that George W. Bush enjoys The Three Stooges. It makes sense. He’s a compassionate conservative and also has a soft spot for people who can’t do their jobs right.

For a group of men who could never do their jobs right, the Stooges somehow managed to find work during the Great Depression. At one time or another they were tailors, ice men, plumbers, chefs, law men, musicians, construction workers, boxing impresarios, and traveling salesmen, to name a few.

The other day I watched the boys (Larry, Moe, Curly) serve as gas-station attendants. A snazzy open-topped sedan pulled in, bearing three professorial gentlemen in the back seat. Each man wore a black top hat and each was appointed with monocle and urbane facial hair—goatees or van dyke beards. To their credit, the Stooges tried like the devil to give these academics good service, but perhaps they were trying too hard. Hats got knocked from heads, for instance, and monocles got shattered, and rivers of oil got sprayed onto faces.

Then soon, through an unorthodox turn of events, Curly was rotating on a spit. Either the special effects were better for that particular episode than they were for the thousand others, or Curly was actually rotating above a fire. He went round and round until his partners finally rescued him. He next bounced on the grass and made that signature noise that I cannot spell, while smoke emanated from his rump.

The Stooges don’t easily amuse me in my old age, but as a kid I watched them in the kind of blissful state that today is found only on Tibetan hills and in the audiences of Norah Jones concerts. I even wrote a Stooges episode and recruited my buddies to perform it with me for our sixth-grade class. The act of writing this script brought great agony. I spent days and days hunched over a Big Chief tablet, making James-Dean faces as I tried to decide whether Moe should poke out Larry’s eyes or rip luxurious tufts of his hair, and whether Shemp should drink motor oil or turpentine.

When they saw the manuscript, my buddies were alarmed that I had chosen Shemp over Curly.

Curly is the world’s favorite Stooge, but I happen to think Shemp is superior to his brother. Curly is more of a one-trick pony. He does everything loudly and largely. Shemp, on the other hand, can play big and he can play small. Plus, there’s much more to his face—more to empathize with. When Curly takes a carpenter’s saw to the skull, you know it’s fake. When Shemp takes the blade, your thoughts and prayers go out to his agent. In short, Curly is sometimes amusing, but he cannot pack Shemp’s lunch. And if he could, I suppose that lunch would consist of a coat of brown paint slathered between two slices of white bread.

Anyway, when my script was ready, our teacher let us kids caravan across the parking lot to the church basement, where we rehearsed on the stage without adult supervision. Soon the old custodian happened by. He had a history of saying little and saying it softly, but our antics sent him into a rage. The coot waved his industrial broom and demanded we return to our classroom at once.

Later, our teacher said the janitor told her we were horsing around on the stage.

“Yes,” I said. “We were rehearsing ‘The Three Stooges,’ not William F. Buckley’s ‘Firing Line.’”

The truth is, I did not say that, but I wish I had.