From A Mountain Top

I had a mind to write a poem this morning. I found a photo of Corrine that I like. In it she's posing, wide-eyed, broad-smile, a little bit of mischief there.

I was hit with a lightening bolt of inspiration, I suppose. But then, when it came down to it, I found the words wanting. The language left me. And so much as it always does, inspiration evaporated.

It was to be something about my feelings for Corrine, of course. I am unashamedly and unabashedly, sickly-sweetly in love with her. I make no apologies about wearing my feelings for her on my sleeve. And lapel. And chest, arms, legs.

Which is peculiar, considering how these types of public displays used to be so stomach-churning for me. To hear someone talk about another with passion was embarrassing. There was a sort of desperation in it, like they were trying just a little too hard to justify the love, and therefore perhaps it was their way of projecting. That the reality of their relationship was quite the opposite of what was being said.

The truth is, I was inwardly jealous of that level of exorbitant love. I scoffed outwardly. I told myself that no one could realistically feel that much about a person without shining it on just a little.

Just as men are not to cry in public, there was this unwritten rule about romantic utterances.

I don't believe that anymore. It was an attitude I adopted somewhere in my early 20s and deepened every year until it was just part of my mental fabric. Love, but love quietly. Together, alone, but not in front of people.

My poem this morning was to be about my emergence out of this.

How a single person can affect you in such a way that it shakes up your foundation. Tears down walls, perceptions, breaks through and sheds light. Forgotten light.

I'm no poet though, as much as I'd like to be. Those fellows can say in 15 words what it takes 1,000 for me. The good poets can capture the feeling like a photographer freezes a moment, yet seem to speak volumes.

I'm a novelist. Therefore, I MUST speak in volumes and hope that somewhere in the rambling bramble of my thoughts one can spot my MESSAGE.

Which is simple: I love Corrine.

For lots of reasons. Some I've said here in my blog, many I have not. But probably the biggest reason of all is for teaching me that love should be exclaimed often, and loudly, vociferously, without apologies and certainly with passion and conviction.

Because if you feel it, but are afraid that people will hear you, then you shouldn't be allowed to feel it at all.

Frag It

Friday Fragments is an idea from Mrs. 4444 over at Half Past Kissin' Time. Check her out. A lot. She's cool.

Folks at 50

Mom and Dad will be celebrating their 50th on June 13. Corrine and I, along with my three other siblings, have been working on preparations for it since February.

It's going to be a fun time. We decided to have it on the coast, and to serve lobsters and steamers, my folks' favorite Maine dish. We're having a singer perform three of their favorite songs, including Etta James' "At Last".

This is the front of the invitation I designed. I can't believe they've been married 50 years. Who does that? They should get a Presidential Medal, not just a lobster dinner.

Never Too Late

The play I am directing, "Never Too Late" is coming into the home stretch. The actors are close to getting their lines straight, costumes are taking shape, the set is all but finished.

The play is about a couple in their late 50s who find out the wife is pregnant. They already have a daughter, who is 23 and lives with them with her husband.

It's a farce and it's hilarious.

I'm having a great time directing and I'm positive it'll bring in a full house.

Purple Goes POD

I made a decision yesterday that was not all that easy.

I published my first novel, Surfacing, using a process called publish on demand. It's sort of like self-publishing, in that you don't go through a traditional publishing house (like Bantam or Random House.)

With POD, you do all the hard work like, you know, the writing, then you contract with a publisher who acts as your intermediary. Whenever someone orders your book online, or through a bookstore, the order is placed with the publisher and just that copy is printed. As opposed to traditional publishing, which prints a certain number of books and distributes them to bookstores in select areas.

Here's the rub. Literary snobs will tell you that if you go POD, you're not a "legit" writer, because it's "too easy." Any schmo can get something half-assed printed and call it a novel.

The problem with that argument is that I still do the writing. The toiling. Shedding blood sweat and tears. Not to mention the fact that I've some God-awful pieces of shit from traditional publishers.

Going POD means I get the book immediately and no paper is wasted. My books are on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, etc. It also can be order through any bookstore in the world.

The only reason I would go traditional is for the added "legitimacy" still attached to it. Reviewers, for example, will not review self-published or POD novels. At All. And a favorable review would be HUGE for sales.

Anyway.

I don't like snobs. I don't like conventional thinking most of the time. Therefore, Purple Holly, my second novel (and one of three fictional projects I'm currently working on) will be POD.

I will have to suck it up and work hard at getting the message out when it's published. I'll be in touch. I have an idea for getting you, dear reader, to help me.

:-)

The Lovelies

"Love you, Fiffin"

Food for the Fiction Monster

If you're anything like me, then I'm sorry for you.

But seriously, I have moments during most days in which I recall something from my past that is so utterly random and so detached from the present that it makes me stop in my tracks.

I chalk it up to my writer's mind trying to unearth bits of things that I might want to use in my fiction. God knows I can't do it while actually sitting down at my computer WRITING.

For example? Well, here are a few memories that came up in recent days, the ones I remember anyway. I've GOT to start carrying around a small notebook.

Chatty Cathy

- I worked as a night editor for a daily newspaper in Vermont. It's the last job in newspapers I ever had, actually. I would come to work at around 9 p.m. and work until 5 or 6 a.m., when the paper was beginning to be put together. My job was to edit the copy from the previous night's stories. Well, to keep awake, I made a fresh pot of atrocious sludge and drank it throughout the night. The taste killed me. The caffeine kept me employed.

Well, one morning, I was heading out when one of the copy editors waved me over to her computer. Copy editors tweaked the last stories. Spelling, grammar, that sort of thing. Nothing heavy. Never getting into the guts of the story to reshape it into something readable. This particular copy editor - I'll name her Cathy for the sake of privacy - was no shrinking violet. She told it like it was. To anyone. She had an opinion about everything and it was never flattering.

The thing that made it worse is that Cathy was in no position to criticize anyone about anything. She was a chain smoker, a bit frumpy in appearance, not well-read at all (of anything of substance beyond the tabloids), an admitted hater of men, and a fucking know-it-all. About EVERYTHING. I know you've met someone like her in your life. The type of person who just can't shut up and whose opinions are always vile and cutting.

Anyway, Chatty Cathy waved me over and I obliged. The morning copy editors were instructed to consult with me if they flagged something in a story beyond misspellings. So here I am thinking she's read something she doesn't understand and therefore must have me okay her corrections.

Nope.

I bent low, over her shoulder, peering at the story on her screen and she says, loudly, "Nobody wants to see your open fly."

I had everything I could do to refrain from shoving her forehead into the monitor. Instead, I straightened. And zipped up my fly. Right there next to her.

Slow like.

Sonny

- I was with my father the day he told my uncle, on my mother's side, that their brother had awoken from a coma and had smiled.

The back story first. My uncle Sonny, my mother's oldest sibling, had blown an aneurysm while going to the bathroom. They rushed him to the hospital and the prognosis was grim. He was not expected to live.

He was in a coma for over a week, the expectation being that he would never wake up. He was maybe not yet 50 years old and had two young children and a wife.

Everyone in the family visited him, that somber shuffle of people in an out of his hospital room who were there to give their last respects more than anything.

His youngest brother, my uncle Sheldon, was building a house from scratch. Ten days after the ambulance rushed Sonny to the hospital and the doctors had delivered their best-guesstimate for his lights-out, Uncle Shelly stood on the sub-floor of his unfinished house and was hoisting a beam into place when my dad and I arrived.

I remember this part most vividly. My uncle Shelly, in a sweat-stained t-shirt, stubble, worn-out from the combination of physical labor and emotional grief, his biceps straining against the pull of the huge beam, and my father stepping up onto the foundation.

"He opened his eyes and smiled at your mother," Dad said.

The beam fell to the floor and Uncle Shelly broke down in tears. My father embraced him. I looked out beyond the skeletal framing of the walls of his unfinished house, out into the trees, and I was angry at how awkward I felt.

The Coward

I'm pretty sure my college roommate was gay. My second college roommate, I should say.

I lived with Daryl my first semester, and he was a local. He lived on campus even though his parents were both professors at the college and therefore lived just a block from campus.

Daryl was not a nice person and the Yankee sensibility in me collided with his Texas-sized machismo on a regular basis. (pro-choice versus pro-life; women are partners versus women are housekeepers and child-rearers; black people are people versus black people are...you can guess what they were to Daryl.)

I say this not as an indictment of Texans. I actually fell in love with the people I met there. They were gracious, warm, and giving people. And I learned a lot from being near them.

Just as there are smart-mouthed assholes in New England, so there are in Texas.

Daryl was also vehemently anti-gay. The college I attended was a Christian university, so you can imagine his attitude toward certain "types" - gays, lesbians, liberals, Muslims, soccer players, anyone living east of the Mississippi, north of the Mason-Dixon; any football team outside of Dallas - were echoed throughout the campus. Even celebrated.

I stuck out like a sore lobster.

And boy did we have colossal arguments.

I mean, how could we not? He didn't even know who Steely Dan was for Christ Sake, and I absolutely refused to listen to Waylon Jennings.

But I regret to say, when it came to his stance against homosexuals, I failed.

Predictably, Daryl chose a new roommate for the second semester, a kid who lived across the hall from us and a fellow Texan named Jeffy. I'm not kidding you. His name was Jeffy.

Jeffy's roommate, Bob, was also a Texan, and was more or less ordered, by Daryl and Jeffy, to move his shit into my room. That's how I found out I had lost a capable sparring partner, and gained a new roommate.

Bob was quiet. Bob was a business major from San Saba who lived near Tommy Lee Jones. Bob was gay.

It was that obvious.

And while the subject was never broached between Bob and me, it didn't have to be. His effeminate leanings made me wonder, but I shook the thoughts off as an unfair, and cliched, prejudice. A book-by-his cover sort of self-admonition. The tearful calls home to his mother at night while I was "asleep" was what answered my question, however.

It's not like I got dressed in the bathroom stall from now on or feared some prison-shower kind of scenario being acted upon me when I least expected it. But I did feel fear, and that fear was realized.

Daryl and Jeffy, one morning, assaulted Bob with such a barrage of insults I felt like I was back on 4th-grade playground and kids who had just learned to swear were trying out every adjective.

Every homophobic epitaph ever uttered came from their mouths, and all because Bob had the audacity to ask Jeffy for his table back. The one they had used for their television when they were roommates and had been given to Bob by his mother as a college send-off.

Bob got his table back. In eight pieces.

I didn't say a thing to Daryl or Jeffy. I froze. I froze with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Of all the arguments I had had with Daryl about politics and sex and religion, I had lost my nerve when it really mattered.

To this day I hate remembering this. Of being a witness to a crime and doing nothing. I have never reconciled this with myself either. This fear that I am a big talker among big talkers, but when the battle ensues, that I become a coward's coward.

Bob finished the semester and we were never close and we never spoke about the incident. I left college and never found out what happened to him.

And the Winner Is....

Mrs. 4444!

Otherwise known as Half-Past Kissin' Time

She correctly identified the five quotes out of the 100 posts I've written, including one dating back to 2005!

Oh. Did I mention I had a contest yesterday to celebrate my 100th post?

Well, I did. I randomly chose five quotes from all of my posts, and asked them to be identified by date and title.

I seriously did not expect anyone to do this. I mean, come on, it's having to drudge through a lot of writing. (Except for those who follow me religiously, then it would be easy)

But Mrs. 4444 did it! AND she even commented on a couple of them. Holy crap.

I need to have more difficult contests.

And what's REALLY scary is that she even knew what the prize was.

A signed copy of Surfacing. My first ... okay ... my ONLY novel (so far)!

The truth is, it was Corrine's idea to have a contest. I was actually going to list one quote from each blog entry and I got as far as, like, 64 and gave up.

That would have been one helluva long post.

So congrats to MRS. 4444.

Go check out her blog.

It's funny, poignant, insightful and well written.

(Mrs. 4444: Send me your shipping address to turn68(at)yahoo.com.... and don't forget to tell me who to autograph the book to....)

100 Posts Contest

Yes, you read that right

Large-breasted women love Nerds

Oh, and this also happens to be my 100th post

So, in honor of this, I have a contest!

Below are 5 quotes from the 100 posts.

The first to correctly identify the date (month/Day/Year) and the title of all quotes, gets the prize.

1. On coming back, I feared he would start yelping. I was sure his guard-dog instinct would erupt in him, and that he would start pouncing my wife's back in an attempt to alert her to THE STRANGER ON THE PATH. This is what loyal dogs do for their families: they bark obscenities at angry bears while the family can escape; they catch white-shirted Bible-thumpers in mid sentence and rush them off your lawn. ("Good morning, have you found...JESUS!")

2. There is zero romance in trying to eat mushroom caps stuffed with seafood, and baked stuffed jumbo shrimp, in a great restaurant while a 2-year-old eats the tabs of butter and the baby has audible gas. The elderly couple seated next to us were French Canadian and were noticeably put off by Gabi's hide-and-seek behind a restaurant curtain. They kept giving Corrine dirty French Canadian looks as they sipped their wine.

3. The house, built in 1850 during John McCain's first run for the presidency, is slightly pitched toward the middle. Door casings slope toward center, as do the floors, the stairs, the windows. Anything made of wood, let's say. In fact, my second-oldest brother complains that he needs to be drunk in order to walk a straight line in my home.

4. Avis is where I began. And where we all began. Avis and Howard, Ina and Ralph, my father's parents. They were the May Poles around which we, their offspring, have danced for so long, holding onto their streamers and not letting go.

5. I had one of those moments when you're being confronted by someone unexpectedly and the light around the corners of your vision blurs and your face gets really hot. That was how the email ended. Not a word about whether he liked the story or the characters or something.

Colour My World

The second job I ever had was at a department store called Ames.

Ames was like most department store chains, with a rank of checkouts in the front, a sales floor segmented by carefully choreographed departments, and all within an expansive, box-shaped building usually anchoring one end of a strip mall.

I was hired, at 19, as a stock boy, forever running in and out of the back room to fetch this or that; or assembling bicycles and grills; or checking the price of something. All the while working to keep the shelves filled with merchandise. I even had one of those price guns on my hip that spit out little price tags.

My manager was a guy named Dave who chain-smoked, kept a pile of new, unwrapped dress shirts in a tall filing cabinet in his office, and who was reputed to have slept with just about every cashier there, except for Gloria, the women's undergarment associate who was 64 and, ironically, never wore the right sized bra. I never understood why they called her the Muffin Top Lady until one of the other stock boys explained it to me.

Dave was the one who hired me, in late June, while sitting in his office. I had just finished filling out the application at the front desk when, passing by, Dave stopped in his tracks and took the application right out of my hands. Ink still wet.

"Stock?"

"Um.."

"Ever stocked merchandise?"

"Um...I bagged groceries at..."

"Good. Follow me."

And then Dave was off. Not walking. Not running. He was just there and then he was suddenly somewhere else. The only other man able to do this was my father, usually materializing a split second after I've said the would "fuck" or "shit".

Dave could be in Toiletries in the northeast corner of the store one minute, and then in Fabrics at the opposite corner the next.

The fucker was fast, man. And short. And intense.

"Sit."

He pointed to a chair across the desk from him in a 10x10 office that had a one-way mirror in the wall the size of a bay window. We were perched above the entire store and from this vantage point I could see a couple of 13-year-olds drawing pairs of women's panties over their heads and laughing.

"Get the little shits out of my store," Dave barked into a phone. "Aisle 17. Row 12." I hadn't even seen him pick up the phone. Down below, a man in plain clothes snuck up on the two boys, who scattered in different directions. The ensuing chase was like watching a mouse in a maze. I expected the piped-in Muzac to suddenly switch to the Benny Hill theme song. A grown man chasing two little boys with panties on their heads.

"Loss prevention," David grumbled. I looked at him. He had changed out of his shirt and was buttoning up the top button of his new one. I hadn't even seen him fetch it from the cabinet behind me.

"So," he said, sitting now and pondering my application.

"Bagger?"

"Uh..."

"Don't be afraid of me, Drew. I'm not the cops."

Drew? Who the fuck was Drew?

"Turner?"

I nodded.

"Artie's son?"

I nodded.

He sniffed.

"Had him as a teacher," he grumbled.

The truth is, I didn't even want this job. We were on Summer's doorstep. Outside, it was in the upper 70s. It was sunny. I was 19. I wanted to be where all the other 19 year olds were. At the arcade playing Galaga.

Down below us, through the one-way mirror, I watched the teens being collared by the loss prevention guy and escorted roughly through the doors.

"No?"

I looked at Dave. He was halfway through a cigarette. I hadn't even seen him light up. Jesus Christ, this guy was wigging me out. And he had a tie on now. What the hell.

"Can. You. Start. Tomorrow?" he asked, like he was asking a 2-year-old if he wanted to go poo in the potty.

"Um...okay."

"8 a.m."

And then Dave was gone. I looked and he was down in Hardware already, talking to Suzie, one of the newer cashiers. She was blond. She had nice legs and was graduating from high school in a week.

So, I told you all of that to tell you this: for the longest time I used to lie on my job applications. I feared complete truthfulness would keep me out of work, and as a teen, I wanted what every teen wanted: my own spending money. You know. To beat the high score on Galaga.

So, when it came to the line on the application that read "Are there any physical limitations that might hinder your performance as an Ames Associate?" I didn't put down that I was colorblind. I always figured that my inability to see any color whatsoever (except black, white and a narrow band of grays) couldn't possibly hinder me from, you know, checking the price of a pair of socks or assembling the newest Coleman.

I. Was. Wrong.

A three-word phrase I have said more in my lifetime than any other, beating out I Love You, I Need Money, and even Let's Have Sex.

That first day. That very first day at Ames Department Store, Dave pulled me aside 15 minutes into my shift and just fresh from being shown the rounds by Greg, who would roll a joint after work every night the size of a cigar and grin like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and say "It's show time!" before hopping behind the wheel of his Gremlin and squealing away.

"Got an end display I need you to facilitate," Dave said.

"Weren't you just wearing a tie?"

"What?"

"Never mind."

An end display is the space at the very end of an aisle of merchandise used as a marketing tool for those walking along the wide corridors between departments. In Ladies Apparel, for example, mannequins wore sexy lingerie, one plastic hand on hip, the other turned up in a creepily seductive way; in hardware, a collage of tools; in Seasonal, child mannequins wore beach clothes amid sand pails and beach balls and towels.

We were standing in Stationery in front of an empty end display.

"New plastic stacking crates," Dave said, pointing to boxes of opened milk crates used as shelving units for college kids.

"I want to snag the back-to-schoolers," he said.

"It's June," I informed him. He gave me the same look my father used to give me when he wanted me to stop being a dope.

Who was I to argue with Dave, Ames Manager of the Year for three straight years? And, let's face it, I was in no position to try and understand the mysteries of department store merchandising and retail marketing. I shrugged at him.

"Anyway," he said. He was halfway through a cigarette already. It was pinched between his lips as he spoke.

"I want you to facilitate this. Show me what you got. You're 19, you're probably in college, right? Make it collegiate. I'd ask Greg but look at him, he's stoned."

I looked at Greg two aisles away. He was licking a ball peen hammer.

I turned back but Dave was gone.

I spent an hour rearranging these plastic milk crates that came in three sizes: large square, rectangle, small square. You could mix and match them, stack them in any array of combination to give the appearance of a filing system. A tower of cubbies. I had fun with it, creating three tall towers on the end display platform.

I raided the stationery and filled the cubbies with notebooks, pens, pencils. I took some magazines from the front magazine-and-book racks. I folded up jeans and t-shirts from Misses. I found a couple of pennants from last year's back-to-school special and pinned those up.

I stood back and admired my first end display. A veritable marketing triumph. No kid between the ages of 18 and 23 would pass this by and not want to buy everything there. In fact, high school kids undecided on college would most certainly choose a post-secondary education after seeing my display.

An hour later, while helping the Muffin Top Lady take down outdated signage for a 3-for-1 gurdle special, Dave's voice cracked the P.A. system, interrupting Barry Manilow.

"Drew! Stationery!"

From my perch atop the ladder in Ladies' I could see, across the entire store, my handsome display. And Dave was already there. Smoking.

I rushed to him.

"Is this your way of being funny?"

I stared at him. Then at my display. Then back at him. He was on his second cigarette already. I didn't even seen him dispose of the last butt. I think he ate them.

"Uh...no?"

He looked at the display, then at me, then at the display. The way a man looks at a pile of dog shit, the dog, and then the pile again, tapping a rolled up newspaper.

"Are you stoned then?"

I had never smoked or ingested any form of contraband in my life.

"Uh...no?"

"Why do you think that's attractive?"

That's a parent's kind of no-win question. The kind that you feel you must answer, but know that you can't and therefore sound like a short-bus passenger.

"I guess ... that ... the stacks, being stacked, would appeal ... um ... to collegiate types. With, you know ... here you have ... I used pom-poms here. Thought that would catch their eye. I mean eyes...because a lot of eyes go past here. A lot."

Dave shook his head.

"You think purple and green, mixed together like this, is attractive? And why would you put the lime greens and yellows together over here. I mean, there isn't even any pattern. Like a checkerboard. I mean, that I could understand, maybe, but ..."

He trailed off, speechless. A crowd of shoppers had stopped to see who had gotten hit by the train.

Did he mention purple, green, yellow?

Oh shit.

Back in his office he had my job application in front of him and he was wearing a new shirt. Come to find out he had a chronic underarm sweating problem. The pile of used shirts in the corner had telltale rings.

"Colorblind?" he scowled. I had tried, meekly, quietly, to explain while still standing in front of the display, that I was colorblind. It sounded like I was trying to make an excuse for farting in church.

In his office he scowled at my application, then lifted it up for me to see. His eyebrows raised.

"I just didn't think it would ever, you know, come up," I offered.

He put the application back down and looked out the one-way mirror. A crowd of people were throwing up in front of my display. Apparently the particular combination of colors and patterns I had chosen induced vomiting and migraines. Sales were down that week by 28 percent.

"No color? At all? Like a dog?"

I nodded. I had already removed my associate's badge and placed it on his desk, like a shamed deputy sheriff who had just been accused of shooting an innocent civilian.

And then he started laughing. His head thrown back, his nicotine-stained teeth flashing. He slapped his hands on the desk.

And then he was gone. I looked down and he was talking to Misty, the newest cashier. She was a brunette and Miss Oxford County Fair for 1981 and 1982. No one has ever won it twice since.

I didn't lose my job. I worked there all summer until I got a better offer in a GTE/Sylvania plant making parts for phones that didn't involve color.

But that summer, Dave found it amusing to call over the P.A. system every so often.

"Drew! I need a color check ..."

And then laughter.

I never lied on my application again. About being colorblind, I mean.