Driving out of Appalachia

It is one of these nights when you walk around town like a somnabulist; You may as well be in a surreal ballad out of Bob Dylan.

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak ?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone.

And something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?

Dylan was probably talking about his half-confessed gay side. Ah if only things were that simple.

Seems that just around the corner, Somebody dressed in black just handed me a bone, and the dude was carrying something else. It looked exactly like a scythe.


Ah, those half-hungover states on a full moon. You swear your can see around corners and realizations spin all around you---parallel worlds dangerously careening, spilling out of half-completed novels, poems, songs... You long to suture together all the perceptions, for you know you will not be in this state again, and it is certain that this incredible reality -unreality will be gone by tomorrow.

My editor says, You should write when you get like that.
Write? I can't tie shoelaces on this full moon. The simplest task is like, my, sailor friend says, "Like trying to insert a strand of spaghetti up wildcat's ass.

Ones age doesn't help either. You're halfway in the past as you approache what might be laughingly referred to as your future. You are in London, you are in Mexico Cilty, you are in Seven Islands, Quebec, chasing seals...You are in the Air Force, and swear, as you take a drink our of the flask you now caary , that you buddies are still all around you and you are rejoining them at the Airmens Club for that final drink. It is thirty years later, and you are picking up the conversation where you had left it.
Parallel universes. Oh that time of the first solo. Flying high and singing Hank Snow...That big eightwheelr comin' down the track...
A younger,, better looking Ivan walking away from the old one who had gotten lost in the hilbilly mountains of Pennsylvania.

Old Ivan walking down the hillside. There are mountain folk in the valley, cooking something over an open fire. "We see you guys, guys like you, walking or rolling down the mountain all the time. Last night, we found a Chinaman. Were going to eat him. They are so clean."

How is it that everybody gets lost coming out of Harrisburg PA?
...Because the road goes around and around the same mountain, and you always end up back at Harrisburg, after even a hundred miles and unless you find the Interstate you'll be like the man in the MTA song, "He will ride forever in the streets of Boston, he's a man who never returned."

Lots of time to review your life when lost in Appalachia.

Oh, what a fine old, better looking self had left me and gone downt the mountain first. The leisure suit with elbow patches, the full head of hair, the Wallabee shoes, the sure gait. We need some class around here, the barmaid had said at a watering hole I'd checked out in Newmarket, Ontario.
Now too long in the States. Yerassisgrass. You ain't got no class. You got pimples on your ass.
Ah, Pennsylvania on a full moon. Past the places where they had lit the fires on the road, past a depresed dog, past a Sycamore tree. Picking up a hitchhiker. Pick up any hitchhiker!
"For God's sake, tell me how to find the Freeway!

You mean even Nobel winner Heinrich Boll had my writer's problem?

In January of 1950, Heinrich Böll, a promising young German author yet to publish his first novel, was nearly in despair. To his friend, Paul Schaaf, he conddided how close he was to giving up all hope for a literary life.


If I were to describe my situation during the past three months, you would hardly be able to believe it;it's totally impossible for things to go on this way. My wife can't take it any more--things have gone so far that novels and shorts stories mean nothilng to me measured against a single tear shed by my wife:that is how things are...up to now, I've been unbable to work freelance, nor do I earn enough to buy shoes for my children. I've simply undertaken something impossible, and I have to confess I've reached a dead end.

Well, if it happened to an eventual Novel prize winner, it was small wonder that it once happened to me in the same situation.
Here is Chapter 16 of my second novel, THE HAT PEOPLE.

Chapter Sixteen

Quitting work suddenly with 200 dollars in the bank and a wife and child to feed was no easy matter. John thought that he would now keep up some sort of income by freelancing magazine pieces while working on his novel, one he had tentatively called The Climbers. It was to deal with people in the system, and what the system did to them. He had great plans when he started. Here at last was an escape, a way out of a regular newspaper or magazine job, the bloodsucking bane of every serious writer for a hundred years. Well, he had beaten it he thought. Laura did not take the news of his quitting well. You'll be sorry honey. A 200 a week job thrown over just like that.

He got up every day with the intention of writing. But Laura and young David were always around. Without an extra room it was almost impossible to write. He tried freelancing pieces, and he sold a few, but he was panicked to find that it was almost impossible to write from home. No privacy, too much going on. And they were starting to starve. Weeks would go by without anything in the fridge. Finally, no food for the family at all. The lean freelance cheque would be spent before John got them. And in a panic, he found he was losing his ability to write. He began to get rejections from his few contacts. The landlord hounded him. The Becker's Manager sneered at him when he would pay for a few badly needed things with, say fifty two pennies found in the piggy bank and around the house. After two months of being out of work and trying to make it freelancing, John and Laura faced leaner days than they could remember. Leaner even than those periods in Mexico, when their monthly cheques would get held up by the slow, confused Mexican mails. During those desperate days, in San Miguel, they would survive on potato pancakes and cheap fried sausage of dubious origin. Now, here in Downsview, Ontario they could not even count on such staples.

They had borrowed from anyone and everyone, losing almost all the few friends they had left, because of non-repayment. Pride kept them from going to either set of parents.

Desperation, panic. No gas in the sagging Austin. The last Mac's milk jar, which originally brought in 45 cents when returned, had been cashed. Something had to be done, John decided.

On a rainy morning, John got into the car, drove the Austin three blocks to the service station, praying all the while that the fumes he was running on would not give out, and produced a silver dollar to pay the attendant. The silver dollar was supposed to have been little David's to keep for life, a gift gotten in better, more optimistic times.

John, in his suit, clutching a scrapbook full of clippings of his old magazine and newspaper stories, felt like a bag of dung taking little David's money. Laura softened the feeling by saying, I think David will understand, don't you?"

I wonder if he will, John mused, wondering if he had a real plan for the future, pulling up to the offices of the Toronto Sketch, a new paper he had heard on the journalistic grapevine that the Sketch was now hiring.

Well, I had better luck than poor Henry Boll. I actually got the job. Journalism, yes, but shoes for the baby. Eventually I got a column as a rock critic and hey, having been in bands, I was practically in my medium, rock music, though the novel I was supposed to write was stuck somewhere on page 100.

....So good on the journalistic jackrabbit stuff. So disappointed when the editor threw up his hands at my first few chapters and had said, "Man, this isn't fiction. Travel, exotic settings, adventure. But you can' write, you can't fucking write fiction!"

Ouch.

Great to have the job, but what a let-down to do with the fiction project.

Tradest thou another ten years of poverty for a hope in learning fiction?

Well, I quit my job again and sort of did that.

Janitor by day novelist at night.

Got tired of the farting sounds and whoosh of urinals as I made my rounds. I was an artist, Martha! Not a klosetputzer.

Finally chucking everything , including the Stanislaw Dupa job and the mop, heading for my own personal Tahiti, where I would "paint".

Well, I am not Gaugin, but I think I hear a publisher knocking at my front door, apparently interested in my storyof Wahines and other women of exotic beauty.

I hope this isn't an illusion.

Probably is, as the last thirty years appear to have been.

I hear my Newfie friend wondering at my quest at authorship,

"Will he? Will he? Will he?

"Will he? F*cking asshole!"

##

Hey Liz, thanks for sending the picture....I was out of ideas.

I used to pride myself on having the immune system of a starfish, chewing on rocks during the hard times--and still dumpster diving to this day just to keep my hand in.
Can't kill the habit, especially if I find a not- yet- stale- dated sirloin tip roast, all ten pounds of it spewed out of the maw of an automatic and ordinarily sealed dumpster.
Champion seagull figher. I can hear them squeaking, "F*ck-off! F*ck off!
Atavism. Never leave a tern unstoned. "Me f*c k off? You F*ck- off, you over-protected varmints. A man's gotta eat. Don't hang an albatross on me! You guys swarming the Swiss Chalet and Harveys eat better than I do. And Peerless Percy, the parking lot pigeon just shat on me..
It is still two weeks till payday and I won't take shit from anybody. Pigeons to base...you'd better!
Bird Man of Parking Lot. Jesus, a delivery truck just dropped four twine-bound roasts on the asphalt and the meat is so tightly wrapped that the seagulls can't get a beak in. food for a month!...And you guys aren't equipped by heredity to get at it!
Ah the gutter and other warm places.
But not so much now.
I think I've finally got it. Swine flu.
Impervious me? The digestive system of a starfish?

Yes you. What do you think you are, a starfish, a sea cucumber a sea urchin? Scientists have jerked off sea cucumbers for years trying to get at the DNA that makes them able to eat just about anything. Ask Dr. Suzuki, at one time, as a scientist, he had to jerk off many a sea urchin. Maybe hope for a cucumber of the sea!.. Sea urchins and sea cucombers. Fer their DNA.
Migod. Jacques Custeau aquatic child porn! Hope they were of age! Ever try to jerk off a plankton? They exhibit avoidance signs, some of them. Downright choosy!

In any event, I will dumpster dive no more, nor fight with seagulls.
I have developed a cought that will not go away.
Swine flu? I hope not.
Must have been those cigarette butts.
Lord, I gotta sell something as a writer. Gotta stop sarving. Maybe sell this, but who would take it?