Todd Michael Cox's Blog, page 4

Book Signing

I will be signing copies of After the Death of the Ice Cream Man and Dizzlemuck at Fireside Books and Gifts in West Bend, Wisconsin, on Saturday, November 5 (11:oo a.m.).   Stop on by if you get the chance, and we can talk about writing, books, music, herps, and beer… you know, all of the important stuff. –TmC

 

http://firesidebooksandgiftswestbend.com/

Beginning of AFTER THE DEATH OF THE ICE CREAM MAN

[The beginning to After the Death of the Ice Cream Man. --TmC]

 

 Mom died, Tina said into the phone, and it was strange the thing he first thinks of, the time his mind slips away to: 

1976.  He was in a  Marcus Cinema on the North side of Green Bay, Wisconsin watching his first movie unfold before him like a dream.  Someone had dared to remake King Kong and Jonah Swain was loving every second of it:  the darkness, the screen before him like an immense idol, the feel of his mom's shoulder against his own, the heavy sweet smell of over-buttered popcorn, the sound of ice in soda cups like plastic rain through glass gutters. 

At some point he had fallen asleep, waking just when the giant snake attacked, opening his eyes in awe as the great ape ripped the serpent in two, sending tongue and guts into the air, then tossing the snake aside and raging after his stolen love.  The boy sat up from where he'd been curled fetal-like in the seat, and pressed to his mom as he stared with gaped mouth at the images before him, wonder and awe and fear racing through him in one joyful, triumphant stew.  If he had been dreaming there in his seat he had opened his eyes to find himself in another dream, from one set of marvelous scenes to another.  Years later he might think back and wonder if he had ever awakened at all, or which was dream and which was reality.  Everything that came afterwards had been unreal, after all.  But back then he had been too young, too virgin of mind, to even contemplate such things.  Philosophy classes were still a good fifteen years away.  He was only six.

You all right? his mom had whispered, leaning down to him.  She was smiling, her eyes bright in the darkness.

He nodded.  He was more than all right.  He was a child, he was at his first movie, he was watching King Kong roar and stomp through the jungles of Skull Island.  Everything was good and fine in his world, that world six years old and full of tomorrows.  He'd seen the posters for the movie weeks ago and now his mom had taken him, and he knew his parents would always be there to give him what he needed, what he wanted.  He was safe.  Loved.  The tale of King Kong might have been an old one, forty-three years, but he didn't know it, to him it was as fresh as a daydream. 

Why did they have to remake that? his mom had asked those weeks ago, sounding disappointed, crestfallen, damn close to disgusted.  The first is a classic.

He paid her no mind.  That poster had pulled him in, the great barrel-chested ape standing on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a foot on each, holding the pinched and pathetic wreckage of a train in one hand, the shapely figure of a blonde in the other, while below and beyond him spread the terrified and terrible city.  And now here it was, the real thing, in the celluloid-flesh, larger than life… or life-sized, perhaps.  He stared up to the great shambling monster and lost himself in that world.

The boy cried at the end, of course, the destruction of innocence was just too much.  Kong's heart beat slows and slows to one final thump and falls silent.  The camera pulls back to show the crowd gathering around the great dead hulk of the beast, and the image would stay with the boy, all those people staring at death, at the dying of a mystery, the dying of not only innocence but of spirit, tradition, idolatry.  Something had been taken from an island and destroyed for no reason.  This couldn't be the way it was in real life, it just couldn't be, what was the point?  The words the boy would search for were pointless, senseless, ridiculous, but of course he would not find them and would sniffle back his tears when the lights came up because he didn't want to look stupid and his brother might make fun of him and he held his mom's hand and let her lead him out into the night, feeling the senselessness of it all washing over him, like a baptism into something dark, Christianity's black twin.  A sensitive child, they would call him later.  He felt that loss of innocence, loss of meaning, as deeply as he would feel anything.  The blood dripping from Kong's lifeless lips was the first wound in the boy's heart.

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man (some random info)

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man ranges from 1963 to 2003, and takes the reader camping in Wisconsin's northwoods, explores a college campus in the early 1990s, and settles in a small town where memories haunt every street.  Some random influences include "The Fool's Progress" by Edward Abbey, the album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by Wilco, and old barns.  It begins and ends with the word "mom."

Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Death-Ice-Cream-Man/dp/0984366164/ref=pd_sim_b_1

"Our Town," Education, and the Cultural Fabric of America

I was talking about my writing with my neighbor's nineteen year-old daughter and two of her friends the other day.  In describing Dizzlemuck I said that I sometimes refer to it as a cross between Our Town and Gremlins.  Much to my surprise, neither of these references resonated with them.

"Our Town?" I asked.  "You never studied Our Town?"

They said they had not.  After a little more prodding I was able to at least get them to remember that there had been a movie called Gremlins, and that it had been about little creatures invading a small town.  Well, it was of course the fact that they didn't know what Our Town was that upset me the most.  One could, after all, go through one's whole life without seeing or knowing of the movie Gremlins,  and be no worse for it.  You could thrive quite well without it, in fact.  But the idea of not knowing of Thornton Wilder's masterpiece of the theatre strikes me as absurd and… dangerous.

Our Town is a piece of literature that stands as a foundation for quite a lot of works that came afterwards.  If nothing else, it serves as a wall or reference with which to comment on other works.  It is a standard by which everything that came afterwards can be measured.  To not know of it is to be limited in your ability to discuss, with any degree of in-depth meaning, any work that bears even the slightest resemblance to it.  And there are lots of small-town stories, of course, from Twin Peaks to certain novels by Richard Russo and even Stephen King.  None of which contain the depth and significance of Our Town, but you wouldn't know that, would you, if you didn't have that reference available to draw upon.

Now… I had a brief discussion with this fellow yesterday who said that children should not have to learn all of those "unnecessary" things like dates and names, that they should, if we are to progress in this country, learn to be "creative thinkers."

How, I wonder, does one learn to think creatively without such things as our national history?  And that's what he was referring to, of course, the idea of learning all the dates and names and incidences from our past.  It seems to me that what he was talking about doing without are the things that form the threads that weave our national fabric.  There is an unfortunate amount of cultural illiteracy these days, and it's often justified by folks who believe the names of our founding fathers, or the dates of great battles, are useless in the course of one's life.  Well, in truth they are rather useless in one's daily life… but they're very useful when you're trying to make connections and references, and when you're trying to understand not only how contemporary situations fit into the historical puzzle but also when you're trying to simply understand the contemporary situations at all.  When you have all of History with which to gauge and measure our modern lives, why would you want to eliminate such a useful tool?  Certainly if you're attempting to "think creatively" about our modern problems, it is vital that you have knowledge of what came before you… otherwise you are going into the problems blindly, and have no real understanding of what is going on or why it came to be that way.  In the end you will have no true understanding of how to solve the problems.

As we get further and further from our History, as our children grow up without knowing state capitals, Civil War battles, or even Presidents, we dull ourselves… and we dull the tools which we will need as we move into the future.  The same is true of our culture, of things like our classic literature, our paintings, our movies, our theatre.  These are the things that should be strong with us, that should form our collective sense of National Character.  To not have them as part of your knowledge, as part of the background of your thoughts, is to weaken that Character and begin the process of losing our National identity.  It quite simply weakens the nation.

We can't let it happen.  We can't let those things die because of  some misguided, dangerous, and, in the end, un-American anti-intellectualism.  Which is what it amounts to of course, and disrespect for culture and history and science are all a part of it.  It's a popular thing, this anti-intellectualism, and is often used by politicians to rile up crowds of confused individuals and make them believe that arts and music and even history are not only irrelevant but some sort of cloudy-headed nonsense that has no uses in the quote-unquote real world.  And when the politicians have the masses believing such a thing, that's when those masses begin to lose. 

We need our culture and our history.  We need all of it.  Without it there is no We at all.  Without it there's nothing, just a nation moving blindly into a future it can't comprehend and living every moment as if it had no precedent and no meaning.

"I'm awfully interested in how big things like that begin,"  the State Manager in Our Town says at one point.   He is referring to a marriage between two characters, but the sentiment should apply to the big thing called America.  And we should all be interested.  The Nation and its history and culture is us, is all of us.  We started somewhere, we didn't just appear here out of the blue.  There are lots of big things behind us, and if we acknowledge and understand this, then there will be lots of big things yet to come.

 

–Todd Michael Cox

See the Giant Snake! (A Circus Memory)

            The circus used to come to around once a year back then, setting up in a big field behind the JeffersonElementary School on the south side of our little town.  This was a major event in Oconto, Wisconsin, as you might imagine, and the very pinnacle of all that summer had to offer.  The excitement would build when the trucks started coming in earlier in the week, each of them hauling trailers carrying rides and animals.  When you drove past the field you'd see them setting up, doing this work with the efficiency that comes from repetition and necessity, and by Thursday evening the whole thing would be up and waiting, tents and booths and carts of popcorn and cotton candy, all of it surrounded by an old wooden fence of the sort that looks like it's fraying into fibers as you watch it.  The booths and tents would be decorated with all sorts of swirling, garish designs, and there would be banners strung up with pictures of clowns, tigers, elephants, jugglers tossing flaming wands into the air, and women in skimpy outfits shiny with sequins.  Everywhere you looked, craning your neck to see it all as you went past on the road, were vibrant colors of red and yellow and green.  You couldn't wait.

            Are we going? you'd ask your parents.  Are we going tonight?  Are we going tonight?

            "Yes, we're going, I told you a hundred times we're going."

            At night, once it was finally open for business, the little circus took on an entirely different feel.  During the day, waiting patient and still, it looked almost sad, as if it were being denied what it had been put on Earth to do.  But at night it came alive, fiery and excited with lights and noise and the constant bustle of the crowd.  Children were running here and there, parents trailing after them with plastic cups of cheap beer.  The smell of popcorn was strong, and there was strange music swirling in the air… the recording of a calliope pulsing and breathing like the breath of a giant beast.  The contrast of the night you came from and the blazing lights you were entering made you dizzy and you felt like you were in a dream.  You waited in line for tickets and scanned the crowd for friends, and then it was off through the midway to gawk at this bizarre and wonderful sight, this flamboyant oasis that had appeared in the middle of your town to kick a little excitement and mystery into the long monotony of summer.

            Well, this is all clouded by the haze of sentimentality, of course.  I actually remember very little about the circus that came to Oconto once a year, but it was likely small, a few tents and horses, perhaps an elephant.  There were rides and ring-toss booths and a funhouse and all around the constant droning buzz of music and voices.  What I do remember is getting sick on cotton-candy and feeling very overwhelmed at the noise and energy around me.

            And I remember the snake.

            These little traveling circuses always had weird little "sideshows," trailers with tantalizing and disturbing drawings on their sides:  bearded women, wolf-boys, the Fish Lady, and other such oddities, along with things like FABULOUS EGYPTIAN JEWELS!  Or SEE THE HAND OF KING TUT!  These trailers would be set off around the perimeter of the circus, and you'd stare at them as you walked around eating your cotton candy and sucking down rootbeer.  Most of these did not look tempting… looked rather frightening, in fact, as if you might walk up the three steps into one of the trailers and never come out.  I was an easily overwhelmed child, and had never been tempted to go into one of these.  I hadn't even gone into the funhouse, which also looked like it might swallow you alive.  (It didn't help that this abnormally long trailer usually had a big sign that said something like You Can Go IN But Will You Make It THROUGH the FUNHOUSE?).

            The only time I ever entered into the world of sideshows was a trailer whose side promised a glimpse at a GIANT SNAKE EATING ITS PREY!  I pestered and pestered my sister, who had been put in charge of me, into taking me in to see this.  The drawing on the side of the trailer showed a monstrous serpent with a viciously gaping mouth filled with wicked teeth, and that was too much to pass up.

            "It takes too many tickets," she said, which was true, the sideshows always required more tickets than anything else, but I kept bugging her.  "Fine," she said after a while, "when you're done with your cotton candy we'll go in."

            She probably figured I would take so long eating the stuff that I would forget about the snake, but fat chance!  I scarfed that pink shit down and dragged her back to the trailer.

            We waited in line and then it was our turn.  She ripped off what seemed like twenty dark-red tickets and handed them to the barker (who never said a word, as far as I can remember), and then we went up the little steps into the darkness beyond the door.

            There might have been a series of tanks and cages with various reptiles in them (things like geckos and corn snakes and perhaps a green iguana or two) but I can't recall any of that.  It would have made sense, though, and the whole trailer might have been called the Reptile House or something, but it was the giant snake I wanted to see.

            You moved down a narrow hall toward a long tank that took up the last quarter of the trailer.  It was dark in there, and cluttered, and even as a child I had to shuffle my feet along to keep from stepping on anyone, but at last we came up to this tank which everyone ahead of us had been staring down at with weird looks on their faces…  looks somewhere between disgust and confusion.

            "Oh jeez," my sister said.  She is eight years older than me, by the way, and would have been around fifteen or sixteen then.  I didn't read her "oh jeez" as anything but disgust but thinking back I know it was probably mostly a recognition of the absurdity of what we were seeing.

            There was indeed a very large snake in this tank, and it was indeed in the process of eating what looked like a white rat, but… well, I can't say it was animatronic, but nor can I say it was real.  The animal's big head was at our side of the tank and lifted about a foot off the ground.  Its mouth was open and giving us a good view of the back end of that rat, the tail of which was hanging out limply.  We were being shuffled along rather quickly, though, and so were given only a few moments to view this sight.  I remember having the impression that the animal was fake… perhaps my sister said something to that effect, but I can't be certain.  Certainly there was something a bit too repetitive to the animal's movements, such as they were:  only the jaws were moving, a slow up and down movement that isn't anything like the way my snakes look when they're working a mouse down their gullets, although my corn snake does indeed lift her head up from her aspen bed, perhaps to allow gravity to assist her.  If that big creature had been a real snake how could it possibly have been eating every time someone paid to see it?  The thing would have been sick, obese, or dead.

            Much more likely it was some sort of robotic serpent, like the bears that played instruments at Showbiz Pizza:  electronic puppets with limited movement up and down or back and forth but nothing even remotely close to resembling the real, fluid animation of living animals.  Hard to tell, though:  the trailer it was in was cramped and dimly lit, and if there was a small little motor sound as the jaws moved it was masked by the murmur and drone we were making as well as the bustle and screams of the crowd outside.

            Like I said, we didn't have much time to study it too closely, we were marched out of the trailer by an attendant at the exit door, where we stepped back into the loud, hypnotic madness of the circus night.

            Was it a fake?  I can't be certain, but either way they got our money… and made a memory.

–TmC

Life Lesson (an essay)

 

            I was nine years old when I failed my first great lesson in life.  It was the only such life lesson my father ever really gave me before his death three months later and I flagged it so miserably I still haven't quite recovered.

            We were sitting on a small set of bleachers that overlooked a tiny ramshackle baseball diamond inPensaukee,WI.  It wasn't an overly hot day but it was dry, so dry dust-devils would swirl up between second and third bases, moving like ghostly players reliving long lost games.  I was fascinated by those little mini-tornadoes, and was delighted whenever one of them would evolve from a faint stirring in the dust six inches high to a spinning funnel the height of a man.  I can't tell you who was playing (it might have been one of my brothers) or any details of the game, but I can still see those devils spinning and twirling like dervishes from second to third.  Gorgeous. 

            There weren't many in our little audience, and I assume it wasn't an overly interesting game.  Other than my father, who was sitting to my right, the only other person I can clearly recall was a girl in my class who happened to be sitting one seat below me.  A pretty girl, one of the prettiest in our grade, though the name escapes me.  I had noticed her but had given her no attention.  My eyes were fixed on those devils.

            At some point during the game my father nudged me gently to get my attention.  I looked at him and saw he had a tiny insect on his arm.  It was a vivid emerald green, with intriguing antennae that seemed to twitch and explore the air around them.  Other than that, the animal wasn't moving, was just resting on my father's forearm and looking out at its world.

            "See daddy's little friend?" my father said.

            Ervin Cox, it should be said, had been a biology teacher up until a few years earlier, when he had quit to pursue a career in selling life insurance.  Having that biology background, and having been an avid outdoorsman all his life, he had a healthy and active interest in the living world around him.  I honestly believe he wasn't just showing this particular bug to his youngest son in order to entertain him, but was actually taking delight in the presence of this creature that had decided to perch on him like he was nothing but a branch or fencepost.  He was interested in this animal… and why not?  It was interesting.  And beautiful.  And goddamnit, it was worthy of being admired.

            I was looking at the insect too when I noticed that the girl in front of me had turned in her seat and was watching us.  I watched as her eyes moved from the beetle to me and then to my father….

            "It's daddy's little friend," my father said.

            And, almost instantly, I was embarrassed.  I simply nodded and looked away, not wishing to appear too interested in the critter.  I was suddenly quite conscious of myself, my father, my place in the world… not at all a good feeling.  I felt, more than anything, like a little kid… like my father was treating me like a little kid, trying to get me interested in something that only a child would find interest in.  It was just an insect, after all, just a bug.  Because that girl had seen the whole thing I would be branded as a baby for life, would remain forever a geeky little awkward child who was interested in bugs and not the manly spectacle of the sport being played in front of me.

            I can't recall what my father did with the beetle.  Perhaps he flicked it gently away, perhaps he kept it there on his arm and forgot about it.  All I really remember is that sickening sense of feeling childish, and of perhaps being childish,in front of a classmate.  It was summer, keep in mind, and outside of friends you weren't supposed to see classmates in the summer.

            I felt very vulnerable, very self-conscious.  I looked away from the insect and never looked back.  Perhaps a few more dust-devils rose up to grab my attention but for the most part I felt like I was sitting out in the middle of nowhere, exposed and waiting for the laughter to start.

            The lesson I should have learned here was, of course, to take an interest in what you're fascinated by and to hell with anyone else and what they might think.  I should have had the self-confidence to look at that damn bug, admire its beauty, ask my father some questions, and then stick my tongue out at that pretty little girl one seat below.

            But no.  Though interested in that insect indeed, I let self-consciousness and insecurity take over and blew both it and my father off.  And in exchange for what?  For dust-devils, for a baseball game I have no real memory of… for trying to look good in the eyes of a girl who would never have anything to do with me anyway, either at that age or when we were older, and who probably lost all memory of the incident by the time she was climbing back into her parent's car that afternoon.

            Be interested in the world around you, be passionate about the things you love, throw yourself into amazement and wonder and never mind what anyone else thinks.  Yes, a good lesson, one every child should learn, one every parent should try their hardest to instill in their sons and daughters… and one I failed to grasp.  That failure would haunt me… it still haunts me to this day, though I can recognize that failure and grab it by its thin little neck when I see it coming.

           Well, I never had a chance to relearn that lesson from my father.  Ervin Harold Cox, Sr. was dropped by a heart attack that following November, just a few weeks from my tenth birthday.  John Lennon was killed a month after that… John Lennon, who once said the following:

            "You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are.  You are what you are."

            Indeed.  And let your freak flag fly.

–TmC

New Novel Available Now!

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man is out and available from Amazon!  Here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Death-Ice-Cream-Man/dp/0984366164/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311646135&sr=1-1

I will let you know as it becomes available in other places and in other formats.  I look forward to hearing what folks might have to say about this book, so feel free to let me know your thoughts.

–TmC

New novel out soon! Info to come!

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man will be out soon.  Information on when (and where you can get it) will be coming soon!

–TmC

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man [cover image]

 
The front-cover of After the Death of the Ice Cream Man .
 
Again, After the Death of the Ice Cream Man is a somber but ultimately transcendent meditation on death, mourning, and the rediscovery of love. It's a complete departure from Dizzlemuck, in both style and tone, and its writing marked a major shift in the evolution of my personal voice. Despite its subject matter, there are some lighter moments in it, including a chapter about the main character's awkward attempts to win the attention of the girl of his dreams.
 
The image, by the way, is from a picture of me and my mom, circa 1973. The book was inspired by her death in 2003, and is dedicated to her:
 
In memory of 
Patricia Jayne Keefe-Cox

(1940-2003)
Mother
Mom

Hope everyone's doing well and staying safe!

–TmC

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man [new novel coming soon!]

If you could look into the mind of someone sitting in the front row at a funeral, what would you see?  Sadness, yes, but old memories, too, and not always the memories you think there'd be.   A story as well, perhaps.  A tale of ancestry and evolution, of things lost and found, of origins and transcendence.  Of the presence of ghosts and the need to keep living.

A story of love.

After the Death of the Ice Cream Man   

A new novel by Todd Michael Cox

……..coming soon………