Jacke Wilson's Blog, page 79

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #14 – The Bass Guitar

Are you familiar with the Suzuki method? I wasn’t. Oh sure, I’d heard of it—all those cute little violin prodigies, and something about kindergarteners learning how to play by ear that sounded impressive—but I didn’t know many details until I signed my kid up for piano lessons with a Suzuki teacher.

It turns out that Suzuki is great for kids. And really, really rough on parents.

Want to drop your kid off at a lesson once a week and pick him up an hour later? Nope. Because you’ll be sitting there during the lesson, watching and taking notes and cringing at each flaw that you were supposed to work on that week. How about listening to your kid practice in another room while you check your emails? No, that will not be your life. You’ll be in the room, listening, watching, helping.

Every night.

I won’t bore you with the other details except to say that you practice the same songs many times and by the end the kids turn into tiny musical geniuses. What they do is incredible. They can switch hands and play the right hand part with the left hand and vice versa. They can play songs by heart, and they can do things like play them backwards, and they can improvise. They can switch keys in mid-song. It’s astonishing. And they all can do it.

Halfway through our first year I realized my kid had developed perfect pitch. It really could not have been going better.

But there I was. Night after night I sat in the chair, listening patiently to my seven-year-old run through the same songs. Twinkle in every possible variation. Honeybee. Cuckoo. Lightly Row. London Bridge. Mary Had a Little Lamb. Long, Long Ago.

All these songs, night after night. And me just sitting there, smiling and nodding and making mild suggestions.

The boredom creeping in. The tension building. Waiting. But no. Back to the Twinkles. Variation A. Variation B. Variation C. Variation D. Honeybee. Cuckoo. Lightly Row…more Twinkles…

Until finally one night I walked out in the middle of practice. I went to my office, closed the door, and turned on the computer.

That was the night I impulsively purchased a bass guitar, because I needed something new to happen.

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Learning the bass guitar was something I had always wanted to try. I had dabbled with some acoustic guitar without much success. But I liked the idea of bass lines: thumping out some subterranean rhythm while the melody floated overhead. It was a simple enough concept—you only played one note at a time, which seemed reasonable to attempt. I had listened to enough music to know how to support a melody with a simple bass line. I could read a guitar tab. I liked a good groove.

And now I knew a set of songs very, very, very well. Au Clair de la Lune. Goodbye to Winter. Go Tell Aunt Rhody. Eighteen songs total. Songs I heard in my sleep.

When the guitar arrived my son was excited, though not in the way I expected. I was hoping for a “whoa, dude, we’re going electric” sort of thing. What I got was  more of an “I’m serious about music and you have just introduced a new instrument into the mix, which presents an interesting challenge with some good opportunities.” What could I say? He was a Suzuki kid.

“Can you play this?” he asked after I had removed it from the box and plugged in the amp. He played a part for me on the piano with his left hand. All quarter notes, a simple rhythm. A bass line I had heard him play literally a thousand times or more.

I checked my book to make sure I knew where C was and worked out the pattern on the guitar. The strings buzzed a little but I soon managed to get that under control.

We sounded fantastic.

My son clearly agreed. “And this? Can you play this?” He jazzed up the line a little with syncopation—not that he knew that that was what it was called. To him it was just a different sound in his head.

I listened to his line, my heart pounding. This is what bands did! Real bands, bands who played in basements and garages and bars and studios!

I took a deep breath. Once again, the notes were the same as before. Easy. The rhythm was not all that difficult. I managed to play what he wanted. It sounded great.

He, meanwhile, played the melody with a jauntiness that floored me. My bass line and his left hand were in perfect sync. The way we fit together reminded me of those acrobats who clasp each other’s wrists and heave a third acrobat—the melody, in this case—into the air to do somersaults. We were doing noble work, his left hand and my bass guitar. We were setting up the right hand to soar.

“What do you think!?” I cried as we wrapped up the best Go Tell Aunt Rhody ever heard in our house.

He nodded with approval, eyes still on the piano. “And can you play this?”

With his left hand he suggested a different part. Once again, it sounded amazing. I was giddy with how well this was working. This time I added a few grace notes of my own. Bass guitar is of course as difficult to master as any instrument, but it’s pretty easy to get up and running if you have even a basic idea of what you’re doing.

“What do you think?” I shouted.

My son nodded and smiled. I felt like I was passing an audition.

We went through half the songs in the book. I was playing simple lines, mostly half notes and quarter notes. Already I could hear in my head things I wanted to try. And he could too! Several times he stopped, narrowed his eyes, and continued—recording in his mind spots where he thought the bass line could be improved. I felt like he was getting inside the music in a way he hadn’t before.

“This is just like being in a band!” I said, worrying that it was more my dream than his. He would know someday, when he was in high school, just how cool this was. But what about now? Didn’t he feel it?

He smiled and pumped his fist. “We can call ourselves…Lightning Rock!” Yes! He got it! Rock stars!

Lightning Rock. I was in a band with my son. A real band. Who knew where this would lead? His younger brother liked to bang on things and claimed his favorite instrument was the drum. His mother had a beautiful voice. We wouldn’t be Van Halen or anything, of course. But maybe a few local gigs…? Not now, but maybe in a few years…?

But I was getting ahead of myself. This was fun enough as it was. My son and I were close in a new way: not just family close, but musician close. Where you can anticipate each other’s moves and read each other’s minds and communicate ideas without using words. It was a fantastic feeling. I felt as if I had reached some kind of pinnacle of parenting, one that I had not even known was there.

What a transformative purchase! This whole thing had cost 89 bucks, amp included! Strap and vinyl case and pitch pipe thrown in for free! And for a pinnacle of parenting! It was the best money I had ever spent!

I was proud of both of us: him for being able to give me direction—all those months of lessons were really paying off. And me, of course, for being clever enough to buy the guitar and skilled enough to take his instructions.

As I got more comfortable I experimented some more. Coming in later to give the bass line an echoing effect, for example, and now and then jumping octaves. Hitting the fifth instead of the root. Coming in with a pick-up note. As I did each little flourish I would stare at my son to see what he thought. Most of the time I had to read his body language, which didn’t tell me much. On occasion he would nod, which filled me with joy, and whenever he would smile and nod, my heart would jump through the roof. He liked what I did! He approved! I was making it in the band!

This lasted about ten minutes.

“How about…this?” he said at that point, playing a left-hand part for Goodbye to Winter that I had never heard before. It was a little tougher, but I managed to get it with only a couple of mistakes.

“Well, okay…” he said uncertainly. Clearly he didn’t like the mistakes. “And can you do…this?” He played a different line.

This one was even harder. How did he rattle these things off? And what was this, a test?

I had to ask him to show me a second time.  But he had already launched into Christmas Day Secrets. I started on the wrong root note and never caught up. “Wait!” I said as we were halfway through. “I’m not there yet. You have to wait. And…slow down!”

He lifted his hands from the keys and turned to look at me. He looked surprised, as if he couldn’t believe that he had needed to stop. “This is the right speed,” he said simply.

“It’s too fast! We’re just practicing!”

He shook his head slowly, puzzled by my objection. “But…it’s the right speed.”

He turned back to the piano and started over. I sensed something going through his mind: perhaps it was the first moment when he realized that I was just a beginner. Parents are typically not beginners at things. He shook his head, marveling to himself.

My heart fell. I recognized that look. It was the same thing I did when watching him try something ridiculous, like the time he tried to eat an ice cream cone from the bottom up. What’s he thinking? Is he even thinking at all? 

Meanwhile I was trying to get my part right—the part he had suggested. My mind couldn’t quite remember what he had wanted, and my fingers weren’t keeping up with my mind anyway. And now he was speeding up even more. It was maddening.

“Slow down!” I said. “You have got to slow down.”

“Oh, never mind,” he said and changed his own left hand part. He was playing both parts now, the one he had intended for himself and the one he had invented for me. Both parts himself. It sounded great and was pretty impressive, but I felt insulted nevertheless.

“Don’t cut me out like that—I can get it if you just slow down!” I had to shout to be heard over the piano, which he was playing loudly, with every note perfect, of course.

“You need to speed up!” he said again.

“I’m the bass,” I said, pulling rank based on my many years of experience, which included the twenty-five minutes I had spent playing the instrument. “I set the pace! Your job is to follow!”

“I’m the melody. The lead. You have to keep up!”

He had a point. I doubted that Eddie Van Halen ever slowed down for Michael Anthony. (Who’s Michael Anthony, you ask? Exactly my point: he was the band’s bassist.)

I tried to go faster. Of course I made even more mistakes. I  realized at one point that I was playing in the wrong key, but how could I change on the fly? I was nowhere near that nimble. And he wasn’t slowing down or stopping, giving me no chance. I pressed on. It sounded bad but not completely horrible. You could sort of bend your ear, so to speak, and hear how it should have sounded. Good enough for our first practice.

For me it was, anyway. For the Suzuki boy with perfect pitch, it was more like a final straw. He finished the song and swiveled on his chair.

“Maybe you could play it if you weren’t drinking beer,” he said angrily, jabbing his finger at the bottle sitting on the table next to me.

I stared back at him. Yes, I drank an occasional beer! One beer a night, once in a while! Didn’t he know how hard I worked? Slaving away all day, working under intense pressure, and then to come home, listen to this piano every night, and homework, and baths, and reading the same books over and over at bedtime…and weekends were all birthday parties and soccer games and all things for him and his brother…my whole life was parenting, and obligations, and adult responsibilities…

I took a swig to demonstrate that I did not intend to give up the beer any time soon. He sighed and frowned in a way that made me regret my defiance.

Then, as I set the bottle down, he started again. He was playing at the same pace. Impossibly fast, it seemed, but I had something to prove now. I launched into my part.

It did not go well. This time I lost the rhythm altogether and had to mime the notes with my fingers so I’d be ready the next time. When it was over he turned and looked at me with total disdain.

“You have to play,” he said. “You can’t just hum.”

Was this the end of Lightning Rock? I could hear the voiceover of a million VH1 Behind the Music documentaries. “And then the band’s bassist, wrestling with substance abuse issues, was forced to make a difficult choice…”

No! I couldn’t be the bassist kicked out for substance abuse issues! I jumped from my chair, ran to the kitchen, and poured the remaining beer down the sink. Then I returned to the piano room, smiling, expecting a hero’s welcome. We were a band! Bandmates have each other’s back when they’re coming out of rehab!

Not this bandmate. He was playing Christmas Day Secrets again. Harder than ever.

“That’s in a different key!” I cried, aghast.

He nodded and sped up. I could not even begin, because I had to wait for him to finish to tell me what key it was. I do not have perfect pitch. We are not all so gifted.

Sighing again, he looked at the keys, brushing them with his fingertips, lost in thought. Then he turned slowly and gazed at me in a way that shot right through me. Michael Anthony probably felt this way when they kicked him out of the band so Eddie’s son Wolfgang Van Halen could join the reunion tour. No! Please! I was Lightning Rock’s bassist. I’d been there since the beginning. I needed this!

“Come on!” I said. I pulled out the pamphlet that had come with the guitar box. “Show some loyalty! I’ll find the notes! And no more beer! I promise!”

He remained quiet as I unfolded the paper and tried to orient myself amid dozens of chord charts that all looked the same.

“How long is that going to take?” he said at last. His voice was cool.

I looked up, completely humiliated. He shrugged and went on to play the song by himself. Unaccompanied. Eddie was going on a solo tour.

“Okay, okay. Let’s try one more time,” I said, having zero confidence in my ability to play what he wanted but desperate to keep the band together. Can’t you see? Can’t you see how much I need this! “Come on,” I said. “One more. One more try.”

“It’s my bedtime,” said my son.

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At bedtime the balance of power shifted. I was required again, which gave me some hope. Did Michael Anthony ever tuck in Eddie Van Halen? Read him a story? Tickle him to make him giggle and forget about the monsters in the closet?

I was still the parent! It was my piano. My guitar. My house. He wouldn’t be able to play at all if it weren’t for my wife and me. He wouldn’t even eat.

Except the music. That didn’t belong to me. I couldn’t own the music in his head, or the talent and skill with which he expressed it.

Talent wins, and I defer. That was how it had always been for me.

As I was reading the bedtime story, I reflected on how many times I had lost in my life. Losses, losses, losses: it was my entire life until that point. Losses as far as the eye could see, with some poor semblance of a victory every thousand miles or so, bobbing along like a lonely buoy on a vast sea of losses.

Losses to a million different people who proved themselves better than me in every endeavor. That had been my most common experience: watching the superior talents of others be recognized. Losing to all those people, again and again and again. And now losing to him. Losing to him was no different.

Except it was! Losing to him was mixed with pride. The boy – my son – had talent! He was already better than me! Well on his way! How wonderful for us both!

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“That was fun tonight,” I say after I close the book. “Lightning Rock!”

I’m trying to rekindle his nostalgia for something that began and ended less than an hour ago. It was a good run. Van Halen had the ’80s. We had from 7:05 to 8:02 on an evening in February. The era of Lightning Rock. The peak minutes.

“I love you, Dad,” my son says, devastating me with his recognition of what I was trying to do.

Parents think too much sometimes. While I was playing out these psychodramas, he was just having fun. He was not following the VH1 narrative of a band’s rise and fall. He was just playing the piano, one night among many. And I just happened to be there too, hanging out the way we did when we shot hoops, or went to the movies, or got haircuts. For him, it was no more complicated than that.

I pull his covers up to his chin and kiss his forehead. There’s always a part of him that hates going to bed, because he wants to continue the day. I feel the same way. The days are not long enough and could never be.

“Hey Dad,” he says as I reach the door.

“Yes, son?”

“Tonight, when I’m sleeping, do you think you could go back downstairs, and maybe practice a little?”

“Yeah maybe,” I say, chafing at the implied criticism.

But I can’t stay angry, because his expression is so earnest, full of hope and love and seriousness. And trust. He trusts that I will be able to learn, because that’s what parents do when they’re at their best. They come through. I smile and turn out the light. “Good night, son.”

“I mean…just so you can keep up a little better?” he says in the darkness. “We’ll have even more fun when you can.”

“I’ll try,” I say, hearing his smile.

And my voice catches a little, because I am alone in knowing that he has already surpassed me, and I will never be able to catch up, but none of that matters and it’s all going to be okay.

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Music lessons! You can see my own childhood efforts attempting to learn piano in the popular Object #7 – The Keyboard (and don’t miss the follow-up post full of surprises). And of course there’s failure in just about all of these, starting with #1 – The Padlock. There are more insights into parenting in #8 – The Burger Car (Dad orders burgers with a slice of Proust) and #9 – The Intersection (Hamlet Dad goes to the movies).

All the Objects are linked to from the 100 Objects page. And all are available for free!

What else is free? Review copies of my books The Race (governor recovers from sex scandal) and The Promotion (lawyer goes insane). Just shoot me an email or leave a comment to get the ball rolling on those. I’m happy to send you paperbacks or e-books, whichever you prefer.

If you’re not a reviewer, both those books are available for less than five bucks (paperback) or three bucks (e-book version) at Amazon and elsewhere. Follow the links above or on the right hand nav bar.

But please take advantage of the free review copies, even if you only plan to review on your blog or on Goodreads or Amazon or the location of your choice. Or don’t leave a review at all! I don’t care – I love giving these things away! It’s the best part about being an author!

Image Credit: ultimateclassicrock.com

Thoughts on the Writing Process: The Wisdom of John Lennon

So here we go, some thoughts on writing process as part of the blog tour. But first a little business:

My thanks to the previous stop on the tour, The Starving Artist, run by the amazing Devon Trevarrow Flaherty. You should definitely check out her post on setting goals as part of the writing process.

And I’m fantastically excited about the next two stops on the tour:

Lizzy of My Little Book Blog, who has been featured on this site before. My Little Book Blog is so wonderful, and Lizzy exudes so much enthusiasm for books and authors and writing, that I’m tempted to give up coffee and just head over to her site whenever I need a pick-me-up. My Little Book Blog is a highlight of the Internet.

And then there’s Hibou of the International Sanitorium Berghoff, the one-stop shop for intense engagement with the sturm und drang of literature and life. Hibou reads David Foster Wallace and Thomas Mann so we don’t have to, and his posts about parenting and travel are not to be missed either. There are very few first-rate noticers in this world: Hibou is one of them.

Lizzy and Hibou will be writing about their writing process next Monday, June 23. Mark your calendars! And now, onto the main event.

Writing process! I’ve broken it down into…

Jacke Wilson’s 4 Easy Steps for Writing Success

Find a space that suits you. Make sure the light, noise, and atmosphere all work.
Figure out when you’re at your creative peak, whether it’s early morning or late at night or sometime in between. Arrange your schedule so that you’re writing at that time.
Fail for at least twenty years.
Skip number 3 if you possibly can. But be honest with yourself.

Really, that last sentence in number four is the only advice I have. But it means everything in the world to a writer.

I’m reminded of a great story about John Lennon. When the Beatles were in Hamburg, before the rest of the world knew who they were, the bassist in their group was an art student named Stuart Sutcliffe, who couldn’t really play the bass very well. Or AT ALL, actually. The others used to make him turn his back for photos so that they wouldn’t be exposed as a group with a bassist who had his fingers in the wrong place. Too amateurish. Might not get any gigs.

What was he doing in the band? He was John’s best friend. John needed him there.

And then Stuart Sutcliffe died. Tragically, at the age of twenty-one. A brain aneurysm, possibly from getting kicked in the head after the Beatles kicked Pete Best out of the band and replaced him with Ringo.

“I’ve had a lot of people die on me,” John said later, and he had. His favorite uncle, who had helped raise him and who had served as the gentler counterweight to John’s demanding Aunt Mimi. And of course, his mother, who abandoned him, then reentered his life, and then died when John was only sixteen. After a visit to John at Aunt Mimi’s house, she was crossing the street and a bus hit her.  Just tragic.

And then his best friend Stuart. All before John turned twenty-two.

Stuart had a German girlfriend named Astrid whom the Beatles adored. Astrid was supercool and artistic and took iconic photos like this one:

Image Credit: Astrid Kircherr, courtesy of Vanity Fair

She wore black and read existentialist books and had ideas about style that the Beatles all loved. Their famous moptop haircuts? Astrid’s idea.  Stuart became the love of her life and the two were engaged. They used to wear each other’s clothes. And then Stuart suddenly died.

(Bear with me. I swear this is about writing process. We’re getting there.)

So after Stuart died, the next time the Beatles were in Hamburg they came to visit her to try to say what no one ever really knows how to express.  They knew that Stuart and Astrid were not like other young lovers. They were soul mates, everyone knew. And as sad as John, Paul, and George were for losing their friend, they knew that Astrid was even more devastated.

The three of them had lost one life, that of their friend. In a sense, Astrid had lost two: Stuart, and the person she herself had expected to be.

And according to Astrid, Paul and George were very kind and gentle and generally had no idea what to do, in the shocked and clueless way young people typically are. Or people of any age for that matter. Death is horrible, grief is horrible, we wander around and mumble and fall back on stock phrases because anything direct is too risky and might come across wrong. My sympathies to you in this time of loss. Please accept my deepest condolences. My thoughts and prayers are with you. That’s the kind of thing we say. I sort of picture Paul and George saying things like this, with their eyes down, doing their best.

And then John comes over. Astrid says something like, “I don’t know how I can go on without Stuart,” the kind of thing she’s been saying for weeks. And John hears in her words a feeling that he himself has gone through, and recognizes that she’s thinking something that he himself has thought. All that grief and loss: how can you deal with it? How can anyone? And suicide—well, it’s an option, isn’t it? It’s not just an abstract concept. People do it.

So John tells Astrid, “Well, you have two choices. Live or die. But make up your mind and be honest about it.”

That’s the part of the story I love, those last five words. Because so often we’re not honest.

Oh, we’re honest people – that’s not what I mean. We stop ourselves from telling lies to our spouse or our boss or our kids or the police officer who pulls us over when we’re driving. As adults, we’ve learned that lying is a bad idea. It’s too hard to maintain, it hurts people around us, it destroys trust, and it just winds up making things worse.

We know all that, so we tell the truth. To others.

And then we lie to ourselves. All the time. When it comes to ourselves, honesty is too raw, and too direct, and too painful. Much too hard.

We don’t see ourselves as us. We see ourselves in the third person. We think “what is someone who is in my position supposed to do?” rather than “what should I do?” We think “what I’m doing is working and everyone else is wrong” because it’s easier than thinking “what I’m doing is not working and I need to change.”

That’s why, when I tell you my writing process, or when you listen to others, you should take what works for you and ignore the rest.

We all have flaws. You might be an atrocious speller. That’s an easy one to fix: use spell check, ask a friend to read everything, hire a proofreader, make friends with the dictionary. If you’re lucky enough to get a professional editor, they’ll take care of it. But don’t tell yourself that spelling doesn’t matter and that no one will care about some misspelled words. They will.

And this goes for everything. Does your dialogue sound clunky? Find a way to fix that too. Maybe you need to read it out loud. Maybe you need to record it and listen to it with your eyes closed. Maybe you need to write longhand instead of typing it out. Maybe you need to highlight every passage of dialogue in your fiction and go through it line by line, asking yourself whether this is something that an actual person would actually say, or if it’s just there because you needed someone to summarize your plot, which is too confusing (in which case you should probably fix the plot as well).

In other words, do something. But don’t do nothing and tell yourself that your dialogue is just fine if it isn’t. And when someone tells you it sounded funny to them, don’t get indignant and tell yourself that they know nothing about your writing because you’re the writer and the artist and you know what works best. Be honest with yourself.

And this is where listening to other writers helps. Every problem has already been tackled a hundred different ways. If you can’t figure out how to fix your problem by reading good writing, do some homework on the writers and their process: read interviews, listen to podcasts, do some googling. Find out what writers have done. Try some things out. But only use what works for you.

And in that spirit, here’s a trick I’ve found that works for me. Whenever I write a story, I come up with an idea that I’ve kicked around a long time. Something I can’t stop thinking about. Something that makes me laugh to myself at inappropriate times.

That’s what I’m looking for, before I ever begin: ideas that grab me by my collar, shove me against the wall, and demand that I do something with them.

Then I have to spend some time thinking about them, usually a day in advance. Sometimes they’re big enough to be novels. Sometimes they’re not. And sometimes they’re not even ready to be written about at all. I need to have some kind of hook, some kind of twist, some element that turns them from mere memory into something a little more. A little more oomph, whether it’s a shout or a whisper. Once I have this, things usually flow. If I don’t have that angle, I struggle. I can’t get any traction.

Then I get started. I write with longhand, using a Uniball Vision pen. Blue ink, fine point. I like the pen for flow. And I write on a legal pad. I used to use ones with yellow pages but white works fine too, as long as the pages are clean and ready for the pen. I like to have several sheets still on the pad, a nice thickness for the pen to flow into.

Flow is everything on this first draft. Sometimes I’m not writing any sentences at all. Sometimes I just write notes. Here’s my first draft of Object #13 – The Monster:

Traveling through Scotland, dead of winter.

Most of the time spent holed up in a guesthouse

Reading Corolanus by a fire.

Make myself go do things.

Bus tour around a lake. The Monster. Why not?

Guy on board, from Mexico, we bond.

See snow, never seen before. Driver stops.

Goes tearing out.

Whole bus watches him roll around, holding it in his hands like gold.

Love the child. The enthusiasm. Infectious. Why am I so old? I was 22. Wouldn’t have done that when I was ten.

And on like that. As you can see, I’m really just writing down the framework of the story. The beats. Sometimes I get more detailed and write out a sentence or a paragraph. Sometimes whole stretches of dialogue come out quickly. Those are great: when I get to the next draft, all I have to do is type. But sometimes it’s just a word – weather  or sky  or scared - and that’s fine too. I’ll fill it in later.

Why does this work for me? Because I spent years dragging myself to a blank page and staring at it, cursing my inability to fill it with anything better. Spending hours doing nothing. Taking off days because I couldn’t bear to put myself through the agony.

Is that your problem too? Give my solution a try. Because I did all that until I found that it’s better to face that blank pad of paper knowing that all I need to do is fill it with the outline of a story. There’s no need to go sentence by perfect sentence, starting from zero and revising each one as I go along. That can come at the next stage, when I have a story in place (and no longer have the dreaded blank page). My house has been framed; I only need to hang the drywall and paint a few walls. I’m not trying to build the stupid thing room by room without knowing what it will mean to be finished, if I ever even make it there.

The key to developing my method, which took years, was to be honest with myself. Recognizing, in other words, that my stories were often meandering, or stilted, or clotted with prose. I would have fifty beautiful sentences in a row and the story would go nowhere. Why? Because I was stuck in the paradigm of the Artist as Tormented Prose Stylist, thinking I needed to work like crazy on each sentence before moving on. Story took a back seat to style and originality. That might work for others. It did not work for me.

Nor did it work to sit down at a computer and tell myself I had to write 500 words per day, like one of my writing heroes Graham Greene. My 500 words were usually worthless because I didn’t know where I was going or why. Embarrassingly, I didn’t have any particular goal in mind other than to write books like Graham Greene’s. The 500-words process worked for him, and since I wanted to be him, I wanted it to work for me too. Now I know that filling two blank pages with a story’s beats is a very productive day, no matter how many words that involves, and even if not a single one of those words winds up in the finished version. Once I get those two pages down, I can write a few thousand words the next day.

I’ve also learned that if I’m doing too much editing while writing, or if I find myself going back in and hammering away at myself and my earlier decisions, I usually wreck everything.

Again, it’s only honesty that taught me that. It was a painful lesson to learn, and I’m sure you as a writer have learned many painful lessons yourself already. Or there might be a few nagging ones you haven’t addressed squarely but you know you need to deal with at some point.

And here’s the most painful lesson of all: the painful lessons never stop. New ones appear all the time. I’m sure at some point I’ll detect some problem, or a new one will develop, and I’ll realize that my current method needs to be tweaked or (God forbid) scrapped altogether. But I’ll be ready.

Let’s say you hear that your favorite writer spends an hour a day meditating and works on a novel before lunch and writes poetry in the afternoon. You try that regime and IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOU AT ALL. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Figure out what works for you. But – and this is what’s most important – find something that does work, and be honest about it.

Writing isn’t life or death (though it can feel that way at times!). But John’s advice for Astrid was about exactly that. After she lost Stuart, Astrid could decide to die – but if she did, she needed to do it because she wanted to, not because she thought it was necessary to demonstrate her love for Stuart or because others expected it of her. And if she decided to live, it was important for her to recognize that she was choosing life because she honestly wanted to. Life is hard enough even when you’re committed to living. If you’re not sure it’s what you should be doing, you won’t be giving life a chance.

After her conversation with John – who was still unknown, by the way, not JOHN LENNON OF THE BEATLES but just John, a friend of hers who had loved Stuart and cared about her – Astrid decided that she preferred life over death. Sadness and grief would be parts of her life going forward, of course. But she would go forward. Decades later she was still thankful that John had helped her see that truth.

Be honest with yourself. It worked for John. It worked for Astrid. It works for me, when I’m strong enough to let it.

And you, my fellow writer: it can work for you too.

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Hope you enjoyed the post! If you did, please pass it along with a link or a like or a tweet or however you like to do these things.

My book The Promotion, aka “When Biglaw Meets Big Trouble,” recently received a stunningly wonderful review from My Author Within. And you can check out my response to reviews of The Race by My Little Book Blog (“warm and full of life”),  Small Press Reviews (“an incredibly astute novella about ego and politics”), and Radical Science Fiction (“Self-Deception Is Human”). I’m terribly grateful for all of the fine reviewing I’ve received by these indie reviewers.

And of course, you can find The Promotion and The Race at Amazon.com (in Kindle and paperback versions). The Race is also available in other formats and locations.

Are you a reviewer? Leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll ship you a free review copy of either The Race (ex-governor of Wisconsin recovering from a scandal) or The Promotion (D.C. lawyer becomes obsessed with a woman he’s never met). Or you can enjoy the 100 Objects series, which are all available for free here on the website. Enjoy!

Happy Father’s Day! A Glimpse of What Dad Is Thinking…

As a tribute to fathers everywhere, we’re re-running one of our more popular posts from the History of Jacke in 100 Objects series. Yes, yes: it’s the “Dad orders burgers with a slice of Proust” one. Enjoy, fathers (and all who love them)!

Home from traveling, I jump into the gray Corolla. I’ve been a Five Guys Dad lately, flying to Los Angeles for work and back home on weekends to take the boys to soccer and movies and the library and their favorite restaurant. It’s not an ideal way to parent, but what can you do? My job requires it, and my life requires my job.

As usual, I’m first. As I wait, the smell inside the car rises up and makes me shudder. Old burgers and fries. The smell of a grill, the smell of grease. I do not feel like I do when I’m on a sidewalk and the hot fumes coming out of a bar make me hungry and eager to go inside. This smell is stale and disgusting and I hate it.

I’ve never liked this car. I was forced to buy it in a hurry (two cars in two days) when moving here from New York and starting a new life. Everything was rushed then, everything was secondary to trying to keep a toddler and an infant fed and clothed and safe. I overpaid for the car; my half of the negotiations still stands as a particularly disgraceful display of weakness on my part.

Hate the car. And now I can’t even muster up the energy to replace it. My wife never drives it. It sits here all week, its slaughterhouse smell trapped inside like The Ghost of Weekends Past. The good times have faded, left behind like grease-splattered paper bags.

With one exception (when a rat chewed through some hoses), the car has been dependable. I hate it anyway. I hate the color, it’s too small, it’s boring, the carpet is already practically destroyed. We’ve abused it with spills and mud and orange peels and juice boxes and crumbs. The car is filthy, inside and out; the windows are crusted with bird droppings; crumbs and bits of leaves line every possible groove. Being in here makes me feel weak and unhealthy and ashamed.

And now there’s the smell. The smell that conjures up all my frustrations.

Here’s Proust on his famous madeleine:

And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

Extraordinary changes? Perhaps—but in my case, they were all going in the wrong direction.

#

I started reading Proust in college, when a professor everyone hated or feared (or both) assigned Swann’s Way in a class called “Towards Modernity.” This professor said things like, “I will be having office hours—or rather, an office hour, but I’m not going to tell you when it is” and “I have given an A before, once, but I regret it now and won’t be doing it again this year.”

A student complained that his grade—a D minus, practically unheard of in an English class for a student with perfect attendance and no missed assignments—could jeopardize his chances at getting into law school.

“Don’t be worried, Mr. Parcannis,” the professor responded. “Law schools know me.”

Maybe they did. The rest of the world, however, for the most part did not, which had soured the professor’s outlook. A writer, he was known primarily for two reasons: 1) he was friends with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and could be relied on to give a good anecdote to any biographer writing about his famous friends, and 2) he had famously missed the boat on Catch-22, cataloging its failures and declaring it was “no novel” on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Fifty years later, that review is still cited as an example of reviewer cluelessness.

So this was the man, bitter and venomous in public, tender and sensitive in private (one hoped), who introduced me to Proust. Who thrust it in our hands, demanded we read the first volume in a single work, then gave us a pop quiz as if we were a bunch of high schoolers who couldn’t be counted on to do the assigned work.

Actually, the professor was big on pop quizzes. One question, long answers disfavored. The professor left the room after five minutes and sent a teaching assistant to pick up the results an hour and a half later.

This was the question:

Describe the importance of “the little phrase.”

As soon as the door closed everyone started grumbling. No one had read the book but me. They thumbed through the book to put together some kind of answer:

The little phrase refers to a passage from a sonata by the composer Vintueil. Obsessed with jealousy, gradually becoming aware that Odette might never return his love for her, Swann seeks out chances to hear the little phrase, forcing himself to listen to it to remind him of the time he first saw her.

And then they jumped up, cursed the professor in his absence, and left to get on with their life.

I stayed behind.

In spite of everything, I had been inspired by this mad professor of ours, who had a zest for literature and life that he assumed we would not share. Except I did! And so I blew past the standard answer. First I wrote everything I could remember about the sonata, and then everything that it meant to me. And then everything I loved about the book. And everything I struggled with and did not understand. I wrote about the sonata, and Swann, and Odette, and Marcel, and Combray, and the madeleine. Oh yes: I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.

It embarrasses me now, to think that I wrote so much. Proust’s memories make me wish I had an artistic soul, I said. But more than that, they make me want to live.

I announced, in those overflowing pages, that the book had confirmed for me the path I should take in life. Not for me the crabbed, pinched life, the office drone, the family man, the struggler. I was not going to be a Nothing Man!

My time is now! I wrote.

It’s humiliating now, but there it is. I can’t deny any of it. I wrote of my desire to build my memories, to travel and experience and absorb, to store them all away in “the portmanteau that is my mind.” Yes, yes, it was really this bad. Someday, I said, I will recall those memories—but only if they exist!

Deep.

My time is now! I wrote again. And again—three times altogether.

Yes, I really thought this. I really wrote it down, on paper, and—having not finished before the TA arrived—took my stack of papers to the professor’s office and slid them under his door. My time is now! For some reason I wanted him to know that.

#

Someone should invent a shredder that fits onto the bottom of a professor’s door. Notes slid underneath are always regretted afterward, in my experience.

After I thrust my ideas upon the man who did not care—my time is now!, good lord—I launched into a decade of wandering, of travel, of experiences. I sampled languages and religions and cultures and approaches to life. I stood breast-to-breast with the cosmos. I swallowed the universe and felt its secrets radiating out of my fingertips.

My time was then!

And then: reality set in. The need for money and health insurance and some kind of retirement plan. The obligations of family. And before I knew what was happening, there I was, an office drone, a family man, a struggler. The words Nothing Man may as well have been tattooed on my forehead, except that would have made me more interesting and relevant than I actually was.

#

Proust’s madeleine gave him this:

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

Nice snack if you can get it. Sitting in the car, I feel exactly the opposite. Mediocre, accidental, mortal? Check, check, check.

The door to my house slams shut. My sons, seven and five, are running toward me, lugging books for the journey.

Time to put on my game face. Already my older son has exhibited a dangerous tendency to be as thinky as me, in spite of our best efforts to keep him young and carefree. I cannot let him know my thoughts. I cannot explain that the smell brings me bad memories, or even the concept that smells sometimes do this, because I know he’ll dive in. He’ll want to test the idea, he’ll feel it, explore it, measure it against his own experience, imagine it, think his way through it, and someday wind up as overwhelmed as me. Giving him a set of ideas like that would be like tossing a kid a pack of matches and telling him to go play on the woodpile. Actually, given his genetic inheritance, it would be like an alcoholic giving his son a drink at too early an age.

No. It’s tempting to share my ideas. But I can’t be that irresponsible. He deserves better.

My younger one, by contrast, runs free, psychically untroubled. Whether it’s due to youth or his disposition, he feels things without the overlay of logic and introspection that burdens his older brother and me. I don’t want to spoil that either, so I put on a game face for him too.

The doors open.

“Hi Dad,” says my older son, strapping himself in. He disappears into his book, which has wizards in it.

The little one struggles to climb into his booster seat. It is his mission to manage the seatbelt on his own, without help.

“Hey, boys!” I say. Overenthusiasm: my strategy for pushing the gloom aside. “Who’s hungry?”

Keeping things to yourself is the hallmark of good parenting. I cannot let them know I have just had an existential crisis, a dull, familiar anger that the old, stale, worn-out interior of our car has summoned forth. They deserve better.

And… I deserve better! It’s my sudden realization: the burger car can not be my madeleine! It doesn’t have to be! Because I do have those other memories!

I can reach back to the jingling sound that reminds me of a prayer wheel and transports me to Tibet, or the smell of soy and garlic in a sizzling wok that pulls me back to the night markets of Taiwan. The hot sand under my feet that summons forth the island off the coast of Thailand, and the nights I spent listening to Billie Holiday and watching sunsets with a bartender named Cy. Or the forkful of grilled salmon that brings me to the bed and breakfast in Alaska, or the sip of San Miguel that returns me to the nightclub in Manila, or the froth on the pint of Guinness that drops me back in the deep smoky basement of the Pub in the basement of Ida Noyes.

I did all that, that was me! I have other memories to draw upon! Indeed, a whole portmanteau! My mind does not need to stay trapped in the car I don’t like, dwelling in the gloom of my own weakness and stupor!

I start up the car and honk the horn out of sheer excitement.

My younger son looks around. He sniffs.

“It smells like Daddy in here,” he says to his brother.

Then he buckles his seatbelt, looks at me and the road ahead, and smiles an uncomplicated smile.

#

I am his madeleine! Readers, I did not see that one coming. Ah well, there are worse things to be. Hope you enjoyed the post. If you did, please like it, or link to it, or pass it along in whatever way one does that kind of thing. You can also check out a complete list of the other posts in the 100 Objects series, or try one of these:

#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from a) buying a motorcycle in Taiwan, and b) learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and seeks therapy, with disastrous results
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes an unexpected turn
#1 – The Padlock  - the story of a doomed football coach in a last-ditch struggle to survive a winless season

My books The Race and The Promotion are available at Amazon.com (the link is to the author page).

A review of The Race (“warm and full of life”) can be found on mylittlebookblog. I also posted some follow-up thoughts.

Are you a reviewer? Free review copies are available! If you’re interested in posting a review on your blog, or if you’re willing to write a review at Amazon (or anywhere else), just let me know and I’ll ship you a book. And many thanks for helping to get the word out! 

“Humor, Depression, and Hope All Together in One Short Book”: A Review of The Promotion by My Author Within

“The Promotion was my first book by Jacke Wilson, and now I am wondering if I have been sleeping under a rock not to notice this amazing author…” - My Author Within

 #

Wow! Another great day here on the Jacke blog. The first review of The Promotion has come in, and it’s excellent. My thanks to Mariam at My Author Within for giving the book such an intelligent read and such an enthusiastic thumbs up.

I’m tempted to just cut and paste the entire review, but I’ll limit myself to a few selections. Here we go!

It was an exceptionally fast read.

Wonderful! Not only is this the goal for just about any author, in this case I tried to push the accelerator pedal a little harder to reflect the narrator’s obsession and his spiraling out of control. Glad to hear it worked!

Since the book’s main setting was in a law firm, it was important for me to see that the author did research and included believable material. Jacke Wilson’s knowledge of legal world makes me think that he has some legal education at least.

Good guess! And in particular the book takes a look at the craziness of recruiting season, when aspiring young attorneys parade through, encountering a lot of grizzled old veterans. It’s an unusual dynamic to say the least. A great setting for an Edgar Allan Poe style descent into madness.

The author managed to include humor, depression, and hope all together in one short book.

Thank you!

This is the type of book that makes you think and evaluate your own life. As I was reading it, I kept thinking if my life is any better than the main character’s?

I hope it is!

The character development was done amazingly well. The story introduced us to many characters, and the reader can fairly accurately describe each one. The protagonist’s character is very well developed. As I was reading the book, I felt his pain, his loneliness, and depression. He is a person who wants his job to matter. He wants to leave a legacy behind. He is a person who is obsessed with passion and passionate people, which sometimes leads to his downfall and reason for being lonely in the first place. If I were to describe him with a short sentence, I’ll say that he is someone who is going through a mid-life crisis, and realizes that he has nothing to show for the years he lived.

What an excellent encapsulation of the main character. I’m so glad it came through! Even though he runs off the rails, I have a soft spot for him too.

Jacke Wilson wrote the book in such a manner that every reader will have a different interpretation and understanding of the story. At the end of the book I felt just like I felt during the finale of “Lost” TV show. I kept questioning myself, and trying to understand what really happened. It takes a certain skill to be able to write in such a manner.

Yes! I’m so pleased to hear that this is coming through. One set of readers disagreed—each of the three had a different interpretation of what happened, and none could persuade the other. And another reader told me she read the book and immediately started over. I’m flattered and honored.

And my thanks to Mariam of My Author Within, whose thoughtful and salient review of my odd little book has truly made my day. I noticed that her blog is currently on hiatus as she studies for the bar. Let’s hope her legal career goes better than the narrator’s—as I’m sure it will! (It could hardly go worse…)

#

You can check out my response to reviews of The Race by My Little Book Blog (“warm and full of life”),  Small Press Reviews (“an incredibly astute novella about ego and politics”), and Radical Science Fiction (“Self-Deception Is Human”). I’m terribly grateful for all of the fine reviewing I’ve received by these indie reviewers.

And of course, you can find The Promotion and The Race at Amazon.com (in Kindle and paperback versions). The Race is also available in other formats and locations.

Are you a reviewer? Leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll ship you a free review copy of either The Race (ex-governor of Wisconsin recovering from a scandal) or The Promotion (D.C. lawyer becomes obsessed with a woman he’s never met). Or you can enjoy the 100 Objects series, which is still going strong, which are all available for free here on the website.

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #13 – The Monster

I was traveling through Scotland in the dead of winter. Most of my life was spent holed up in a guest house in Inverness, sitting by the fireplace and reading Ulysses. I was content, mostly, but every day I forced myself to get out and do at least one thing.

Typically this meant I made it all the way to the pub down the street, where I drank a pint of heavy and sat by the fireplace and read Ulysses.

After about a week of this, the owner of the guest house gave me a coupon for a bus tour around Loch Ness. The Monster Tour. A stop at the Monster Museum. Kitschy, of course, but free, thanks to the coupon. And scenic. And sort of interesting, maybe.

I knew I didn’t like monsters. But I liked deception, especially self-deception, and I loved a good myth in an anthropological sort of way. There was something childlike about belief in the Loch Ness Monster that appealed to me. Something historic. Something connected to the land.

I walked down the hill to the bus depot under a cloudy sky and presented my ticket. The tour was as bad as all guided tours everywhere: bad jokes told by a guide who mixed information with spooky sound effects that even he had a hard time putting any gusto behind. As usual I sat there thinking, He says this ten times a day, every single day. Is he insane? Will he be soon?

Naturally I was the only one under the age of sixty. Most of my fellow passengers were enjoying the tour, groaning at the puns and snapping pictures for their grandchildren.

I was sitting up front, by myself. The guide seemed to recognize my likely cynicism. “Don’t worry,” he said to me, off-mike, as the wheels started turning. “We get some really good views. And I’ll point out the Led Zeppelin house. They were into the occult.”

I nodded. Two hours. Two hours to burn. Then the pub, and the pint of heavy, and back into Ulysses. It was good to be out; I liked looking at the fog and rain and green. Someone said we’ll be going high enough to feel the cold. Not a problem: I was wearing the coat I had worn in Tibet. I would survive.

And then, as we’re pulling out of the lot onto the highway that circumnavigates the Loch, the bus suddenly jerks to a halt. The guide stops his patter in mid-sentence and whirls around. Grumbling, the driver points out his windshield.

On the road, a man stands in front of the bus, holding up both arms to force the bus to stop. The man wants to join the tour.

“What does he think this is?” the driver mutters as the guide opens the door. “Tiananmen Square?” 

The man—my age if not even younger, I’m pleased to see—jumps on board, thanking the driver several times and apologizing to all the passengers for “keeping you all from Nessie!” He takes the empty seat next to me—I am the only one not there with someone else—and as we ascend the hills around the Loch he starts telling me about his trip.

He’s from Mexico, he says, and he LOVES the UK. London is his favorite city number one but Edinburgh is absolutely the coolest city and St. Andrews is even better than that and he’s headed to the Isle of Skye and OH MY GOD IS THAT SNOW!

Sensing an opportunity for some group bonding, or maybe just bored out of his mind, the guide forces the driver to pull over and everyone watches out the window as our Mexican friend jumps out of the bus and flings himself onto a towel-sized patch of snow at the bottom of a ditch next to the road. He lifts his hands above his head, squeezing fistfuls of the white stuff like a miser letting gold coins trickle through his fingertips. “It’s cold!” he shouts at the bus. “It’s really cold!”

I consider saying something sarcastic but don’t. A more gentle white-haired lady sitting behind me gives him a thumbs up and a hearty smile. “Yes,” she says, her voice rising but nowhere near loud enough to pass through the glass. “Snow is cold!”

The man from Mexico rolls around as best he can. Now we’re all smiling. How can we not? He’s like a man-child. Maybe we all would be, if we hadn’t seen snow a million times, although in my case I doubt it. Act like you’ve been there before – that’s my motto, initiated by temperament and affirmed by experience.

Not the man from Mexico. At the museum his exuberance continues, as he runs from one lighted display to another, crying out in wonder at every drawing and newspaper article and pseudoscientific report. The other adults and I just shake our heads, embarrassed for him as you might be for someone who’s wearing headphones and doesn’t realize they’re talking too loudly. Doesn’t he know the proper response to these exhibits is a cynical smile, a knowing chuckle, maybe now and then a groan or an eye-roll?

But no. He’s flabbergasted by every single thing. “There she is!” he shouts, pointing at a grainy photograph of a shadow the size and shape of a pencil. “There’s Nessie!”

I’m flabbergasted by nothing—well, strictly speaking that’s not true. I’m flabbergasted by him, my fellow twenty-three-year-old. How did he get so young? And when did I get so old? I wouldn’t have acted like that when I was ten.

As he flits from one exhibit to the next, floored by every single thing he sees, I keep to myself, trying to stay open to new ideas, just to feel what it’s like. It doesn’t work. There’s simply no way I can believe in a Loch Ness Monster, any more than I could believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Come on, man, I think. If there were such a thing as the Monster, people would have harpooned the thing and dragged it to the shore years ago, because that’s what people do.

I do kind of like the idea of a curse. As if all the doubt and fear has somehow been deposited in this lake. I like the idea that the lake has absorbed so much negative energy that strange things can happen here. I don’t really believe in that either, but I like thinking about it.

But of course I don’t say this aloud, because what’s the point? Instead I find myself regretting coming on the tour. My mind wanders back to the pub and the pint of heavy and Leopold Bloom making his way home, then my own walk through the twilight to the fireplace and the rocking chair of the guest house. This is my world. I’m not a tourist and not trying to be. I’m just soaking things in. I’m just trying to live in a place that is not really my home, because I don’t know where my home is anymore.

Back on the bus, the young man joins me again. He’s a tourist extraordinaire, breathing hard, still excited by the museum. He’s carrying a giant bag crammed with things he purchased from the gift shop.

He glances at me sideways. Then, without saying a word, he opens a corner of his bag and slides out the label of one item. He has purchased a rubber version of the monster that will be ten feet long once he inflates it.

He arches an eyebrow—what a haul, eh?—and tucks it back in the bag. I nod and smile, trying my best not to laugh. As I said, we’re the same age, and we’re from the same continent, and here we are doing roughly the same thing in traveling through Europe. And yet I cannot think of a single item I would have been less likely to buy. This is his prize.

He tucks the bag under his seat for safekeeping. “Amazing, no?” he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. “What did you think?”

“The museum? Oh, mmm, I thought it was interesting.”

“And the monster!? What do you think about that!?”

I smile and nod slowly. “Interesting…”

What else can I say? How do you inform a kid that you don’t believe in Santa Claus? How do you destroy that belief? And what if it’s the belief of a grown man?

He shakes his head. “I do not think it is a dinosaur or a big fish,” he says.

I exhale; my shoulders relax. Finally! Proof that I’ve overestimated his naivete. I’m surprised by how much relief I feel just for knowing that the mystery of his childlike wonder does not require an explanation. It was just my mistake. He’s as reality-bound as anyone else.

“Oh, I know,” I say. “But it’s fun. And it’s good for the local economy. And even if there is no—”

“I think it is a space alien,” he says.

I look into his eyes. They are wide and deep and full of wonder. He is perfectly serious.

I don’t know what to say. Trying not to laugh, I turn and look out the window at the lake we’re circling. He looks over my shoulder. It occurs to me that we’re both looking at exactly the same landscape and seeing completely different things.

After the bus lets us off in the parking lot I extend the usual traveler’s courtesies by telling him about the guest house and offering to show him the way. I even invite him to join me at the pub, and he smiles hugely but tells me he’s on his way to the next town.

I nod, more disappointed than I expected—I’ve known the guy for less than two hours; I don’t even know his name—and offer my hand. He pulls me into a big bear hug.

“Good bye, Jacke,” he says, squeezing me. “This is the greatest day of my life.”

The bag with the giant Nessie bangs against the back of my legs. He has no other luggage.

“I’m glad,” I say, because although I am tempted, there’s no way in the world I can bring myself to say “mine too” or anything as phony as that.

He takes four steps to the side of the road and sticks out his thumb. A car pulls over immediately. He jumps inside and is gone.

#

Alone again, I walk up the hill in a freezing mist. The wind picks up, stinging my face with sleet.

At the pub, I take a table in the corner and drink my pint of heavy alone by the fire. I’m not reading now. I’m thinking about the man.

I find myself hoping I never see him again. I don’t want to guess what his life was like before I met him. I don’t want to know what will happen to him now. I don’t want to think about him existing at all other than those two hours, which in a funny way feel as if they belong to me, as if he were a character in a book that only I have read.

And for the rest—his past, his future, everyone else he’s met, all the other joys and heartaches he’s felt and will feel—all those, I can just let go. They’re not real.

That’s how I want it. Better to let him slip back into the depths from which he emerged, uncaught, unseen, living his joyous and carefree life unaffected by encounters with reality.

Living like a monster that is not mine to capture. Living like a myth that is not mine to ruin.

#

Oh, readers, I really enjoyed that one. My old friend, rolling in two inches of snow. And Inverness! What a great place, even in the darkness of winter. Maybe especially then.

You can read more of the 100 Objects Series. And don’t miss yesterday’s special follow-up to Object #7 – The Keyboard.

Some new reviews of my books have come out! My thanks to the good folks at My Little Book Blog, Small Press Reviews, and Radical Science Fiction for their amazing work. As an indie author, I feel very fortunate to have received such enthusiastic and thoughtful reviews of The Race. And more to come soon! Onward and upward!

In the meantime you can run through the entire set of Objects by visiting the 100 Objects page or by following one of these links:

Objects Special Interlude – the music teacher and the artist
#12 – The Tickets to the Premiere – talent and ambition cross paths in Bologna
#11 – The Bench - a day in the furnace provides an object lesson
#10 – The Spitwad – a high school teacher confronts a bully, with a little help from the heavens
#9 – The Intersection - Hamlet Dad goes to the movies
#8 – The Burger Car – a father orders burgers with a slice of Proust
#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns a child’s dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from buying a motorcycle in Taiwan and learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and pays a visit to a therapist
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes a dramatic turn
#1 – The Padlock  - a doomed football coach struggles to survive a winless season

Are you a reviewer? Review copies of my short novels The Race and The Promotion are available. Just leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll pop one in the mail. Or zap one to you through cyberspace, if you are an e-book person. Just let me know!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

100 Objects Special Interlude: The Music Teacher and the Artist

Okay, this is simply awesome.

As regular readers know, I’ve been posting a series called A History of Jacke in 100 Objects. These short stories are fictional versions of things that have happened to me. Like most fiction, they’re based on real-life experiences and drawn from people I’ve known, though the characters are typically exaggerations, or composites, or both.

The stories have been popular, and I’ve been pleased by how wide their appeal has been. That was my intention, of course – not just to share with those who were there, but to express something recognizable to those who were not. So I’m grateful when people I’ve never met tell me they knew coaches like the ones in #1 – The Padlock. Or that they’ve felt the same way as the father in #8 – The Burger Car. Or that they were inspired by the teacher’s triumph in #10 – The Spitwad. Even the ones who say they smiled at my battle with Jerry Seinfeld in #3 – The Blood Cake.

One post in particular, #7 – The Keyboard, about a young boy and his burnt-out music teacher, seems to have touched a nerve. And it has led to a couple of follow-up moments that left me shaking my head with wonder.

The first was from a music teacher who, like the narrator, was given a paper keyboard on which to practice as a young child:

Very, very moving, Jacke, and indirectly very nostalgic for me too. When we lived in Hong Kong in the 50s my parents tried to persuade a Russian piano teacher to take me on when I was four, again even though we didn’t have a piano. Too young, she assured my parents; instead, a dummy keyboard made from black and white paper strips glued to a cheap table was advised, on which I practised for a few months. Then we went abroad.

Fifteen months or so later we returned from the UK, and I was interviewed again and allowed to actually play on a real piano. Said teacher was amazed. “Why didn’t you bring him to me a year ago?” Clearly a few thousand miles was no bar to starting lessons properly. I haven’t looked back, and still teach and accompany now six decades on. Luckily for my students, I’m no Miss Steiner in my approach to pedagogy.

What a wonderful story, with such a lovely ending. So much better than the place I left the narrator in number 7.

An even bigger surprise came from a former schoolmate of mine:

My dad, Gui Lessin, is an artist who lives and works in Vence, France. In third grade when he was still living in New York City he came to visit and sat in on one of my piano lessons on the stage. Afterward, he painted this which is hanging above my piano right now. It doesn’t flatter my piano playing but since the frowny one depicts a certain piano teacher I thought you’d get a kick out of it.

And here’s the picture!

Gui Lessin, circa 1981.

 

What a great painting – that’s her! The inspiration for the story! I was not familiar with Gui Lessin’s work before, but I definitely am now. He captured the mood perfectly:  the looming proximity, the hawklike intensity, and the near desperation – the raw need of the teacher to see the student finally get it right.

Just look at how close she is, as she does everything she can but reach out and play the song herself. It’s all there: everything I remember about that dark, cave-like practice stage and the atmosphere of those music lessons.

If I could paint like this, I’m not sure I would ever write another word.

I should also add that although our teacher was unusual, and in the story I emphasized the impact of watching her break down before our very eyes, I can only view her with empathy and affection. She herself was not to blame, at least not by me. No, I blame the circumstances that had driven her to it.

Many teachers can endure the frustrations of teaching young children because they have a love for children or education. But what if you started teaching because of your love of music? And every day you had to protect it from the worst assaults that young musicians can mount? I found something human, even noble about the way she battled her way through this, in her own way.

One friend recalled her shouting at the flute section that they had played a section wrong “eight times in a row.” That was a classic; I remember the moment and can still hear the baffled outrage in her voice. And now, as an adult who knows what it’s like to try to lead a group of kids in anything, I can imagine the agony going through her mind as she counted the mistakes:

What are we up to now, four? Well, let’s start over, I’m sure they’ll get it right next time… Okay, there’s five. My goodness. Well, let’s try again…Jesus, that’s six. Incredible. Why can’t they play this? Okay, start over… There’s seven. WHY can’t the FLUTES get it RIGHT??? IT ISN’T THAT HARD, PEOPLE…And… there’s EIGHT. EIGHT TIMES IN A ROW, AND WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME. WHAT AM I DOING UP HERE? WHY DO I CARE? WHY DOES GOD HATE ME SO MUCH!!!

Who has the patience to endure beginning music students, year after year after year? I know I wouldn’t.

And who would march alongside the band in the Memorial Day Parade, pounding the bass drum THAT SHE HERSELF WAS WEARING, sweating and shouting at the students to try to keep them in some kind of order and to play some approximation of “God Bless America”?

Not many people are that devoted to anything or to anyone. We were lucky that she was.

My thanks to all the commenters and emailers who have given Object #7 a special twist. And in particular to the artist and his daughter, who together preserved a moment in time that has filled me with nostalgia and warmth.

And of course, my thanks to Miss Steiner and her real-life inspiration – and to music teachers everywhere.

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #7 – The Keyboard

Image Credit: Gui Lessin

Blog Tour – From the Starving Artist to Jacke Wilson

I’ve been asked to participate in a tour of the blogosphere focused on writing process. I love traveling! And I love writing! So here we go!

First, you can check out the gracious portrait of me over at The Starving Artist.

You can also read about Devon’s writing process while you’re there. I was impressed by how hard she works to juggle all of her personal commitments and writing goals. She begins with an emphasis on organization and goal setting, which is truly great advice.

It’s one thing to sit around and wait for inspiration to strike or the “perfect moment” to write. It’s another thing to make yourself sit down in the chair every day and get it done. If you find yourself leaning toward the former (and not getting very far), take a look at Devon’s paragraphs on setting goals for tips and inspiration. And then start writing!

Next week, I’ll be describing my own writing process and spotlighting some fellow bloggers.

My thanks to Devon at The Starving Artist for inviting me to participate. And now, onward and upward with someone who knows what he wants:

 

“Self-Deception Is Human”: Book Review of The Race (at Radical Science Fiction)

“This was a great little piece of political fiction…Wilson shows his writing chops – immersing us in a political world that doesn’t feel jargony, over-the-top, or formulaic.” – Nic Eaton, Radical Science Fiction

I was both pleased and intrigued when Nic over at Radical Science Fiction graciously offered to review my book The Race. Because although The Race is not science fiction, I’d like to think it shares a common set of themes with works in that genre.

Setting aside the horse race of an election, or the debates about this or that issue, what happens to the people involved? What’s universal about politics and politicians? What does a political campaign do to the people around it? What do a campaign and the politicians we elect (or not) say about our society? Or democracy? Or us?

Questions like these are why shows like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica are so compelling. It’s not the space aliens or special effects (cool as they may be). It’s the investigation into the human condition.

This isn’t a new idea of course. I only point it out to show why it was unsurprising that Nic, a fan of that genre, zoomed straight to the heart of what I was trying to get at.

Here’s the title of the review:

“Self-Deception Is Human”

Yep. Once again, my reviewer summarizes the book better than I did. That’s basically it in three words. How do they do it?

This book had a kind of politics that I was not expecting.

From the title and the brief description I expected something more overt – hard politics, maybe. Instead I found a very human centered story that snuck politics in like a Trojan horse. There was no “surprise” factor, though, and that’s a good thing. At no point did the doors fly open, throwing the message and meaning into your face.

Love this. In fact I’m tempted to quote the entire review, not just because it’s flattering but because it’s so thoughtful and well done. You really should check it out (and while you’re there, take a look at the rest of the blog too).

One more paragraph:

I loved, too, that the author sprinkled hints of the idea that they are different from us without being preachy or self-righteous (though I would have been self-righteous about it, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been). It isn’t even a small sticking point of the story, mostly a throwaway, but it was important to me. Governor Olson (and presumably others) are not just the way they are because of their biology or their upbringing – they also have problems of privilege. Power, wealth, status, respect – these things don’t only factor into the success one can have, but in the failures. Wilson acknowledges this without making a martyr out of Olson, and I appreciated that very much.

Wow. I’m extremely pleased and grateful. Oh, and the summary:

This was a great little piece of political fiction. At just over 70 pages I was able to read this book in an afternoon. The characters were compelling. Wilson shows his writing chops – immersing us in a political world that doesn’t feel jargony, over-the-top, or formulaic.

Thank you! It’s definitely daunting to take on a well-worn subject, and I’m glad it didn’t feel overly familiar.

And the final conclusion:

The book was excellent and I look forward to reading Jacke Wilson’s other works.

I’m very grateful to Nic for taking the time to write such a thoughtful review. And like anyone who’s spent any time at all checking out his blog, I eagerly await his novel – I’m sure it will be well worth a read!

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You can check out my response to other reviews by My Little Book Blog (“warm and full of life”) and Small Press Reviews (“an incredibly astute novella about ego and politics”). I’m terribly grateful for all of the fine reviewing I’ve received by these indie reviewers.

And of course, you can find The Race at Amazon.com (in Kindle and paperback versions) and other formats and locations.

Are you a reviewer? Leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll ship you a free review copy. Or you can enjoy the 100 Objects series, which is still going strong. 

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #12 – The Tickets to the Premiere

It was during my study-abroad year in Bologna that my friend Roberto and I decided to write a musical. Not just for fun, not just for some school play or party or anything immature like that—no, we were going to be great and famous writers of musicals. Wilson & Benedetti!

And why not us? Roberto had been playing piano for a million years and had perfect pitch. I had just written a poem. We had both been IN musicals. We liked WATCHING them.

This is all it takes, people. Twenty-year-olds studying abroad have boundless optimism. None of it’s earned, of course, but that’s okay. It’s just there.

One problem: all the good subjects had already been taken. Our predecessors had covered everything we could think of. We needed a theme. Needed a setting. Some kind of story. Luckily, as the word guy, I had a brilliant idea:

ME: I’ve come up with an idea for our musical. No one’s ever done it. Brand new!

ROBERTO: Excellent! What is it?

ME: Okay, so I’ve been reading a lot of Simone de Beauvoir. Just finished The Second Sex.

ROBERTO: Um, okay…

ME: And I’ve been reading a lot of Nietzsche. Some interesting combinations there.

ROBERTO: You want to write a…Nietzschean feminist musical?

ME: With bouncy tunes!

It’s embarrassing now to think how excited we were. Embarrassing to think we even tried. But can you blame us? We were twenty years old. TWENTY.

Think of life as a world of doors. When you’re young, you’re told you can open any door. Right? Just find the one you want…and walk right through! They’re all open to you! We tell college graduates that, even though it’s really not true at all. And five-year-olds? Forget it. With five-year-olds we lie and lie and lie. You want to be a movie star? See you on the big screen! An astronaut slash professional baseball player? Godspeed, little one.

For two twenty-year-olds, roaming through Europe, living like carefree kings on Eurorail passes and a stipend, fueled by red wine (legal here! a whole year early!), well, what were going to dream of being? Accountants? Dental hygienists? Of course not! We would be writers of a musical. Naturally. Of course.

We took a picture to commemorate the day we began:

No, that’s not us. That’s Rodgers & Hammerstein. But it captures the spirit of what we thought we were doing. Capture the moment for posterity! Except unlike those two successes, who sat nicely posed by some glossy table with nice lighting, we were perched on the edge of my bed in the apartment I shared with four other Americans and two Italians.

We were not was exactly living the Rodgers & Hammerstein life. Our apartment had two showers, neither of which worked very well. One pumped out scalding-hot water. (“Too much hot water. It’s a problem in Bologna,” the landlord claimed.) The other shower had a clogged drain and a standing foot of water left behind by previous occupants.

What could you do? You had to shower. You could burn your skin. Or you could tell yourself that the water in the tub was soapy and possibly sterile. It’s good to be young and have choices!

I wish I still had the photograph Roberto and I took, because it would show you the cracks in the plaster on the bland, drab, olive wall behind us, and the mustard-colored bedspread. Our greasy hair. I was wearing fake glasses to look smart and lyrical; Roberto wore a beret with a logo of a Swiss canton, which he had not yet learned was not an Italian flag. And we were both grinning like idiots. Who cared about our surroundings? All great writers started out like this! Poverty would inform our art.

And actually I loved that room, even though it was humble to the point of barely being operable as a room. It had a floor, a ceiling, and a bed. A desk, a chair, a window, and an open corner where I could heap the rest of my stuff. Roberto had a similar room across the hall. I was from Wisconsin, he was from West Virginia. We weren’t fussy. What more did we need? What more did we deserve?

And here was the best thing of all: as a bonus, that room had a big thick door frame that supported TWO doors. I have no idea why. I think they may have redone the hallway and added a second door for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps there had been a fire and this was the way they planned to keep us alive. It didn’t matter. It was awesome no matter what. You opened one thick door and found a second thick door standing behind it. It was as if you had never even opened the first one.

The double doors kept out all the noise except for the singing of Jennifer, my roommate from Yale, who aspired to be a soprano and sang arias out her window night and day. Her voice was like a scream and penetrated even the double doors. Other than that, those doors kept things quiet and contained—once they were closed, our dreams could incubate in safety.

Our enthusiasm is humiliating to me now. I tell myself we had no choice. Youth! Open doors! Make way for Wilson and Benedetti!

I can’t remember too much about the musical itself. Roberto wrote a waltz for some reason. Possibly our Nietzschean feminists were hosting a ball(?) Maybe there was some irony involved, somehow.

I also remember one line of a lyric that Roberto especially liked: “Rome for a lack of brave men like us fell.” Again, I have no idea how that could have possibly fit into any reasonable plot. But it inspired Roberto to add a Bolero-style drum beat beneath the chorus. It was exciting.

Rome for a lack of brave men like us fell. Broadway, here we come!

And meanwhile the rich kids in our program had different ideas of success and how to go about seizing it. Something had to give.

#

Sabrina was one of these people. She was in our program in Italy, though at home she and I went to different universities. And we had nothing in common: she was wealthy, elite, upper-crust, the world of power and privilege, filled with the wayward kids of celebrities. She knew JFK Jr. Also Marlon Brando’s kid, Diana Ross’s kid, a lot of others who were all basically screw-ups who chose Sabrina’s school because the professors didn’t give out grades.

Sabrina’s father was not a celebrity: he was a wealthy businessman from New Jersey who had somewhat shadowy origins. Not the mob, as far as I knew, but something that benefited from his ill temper and willingness to crush everyone who got in his way. (Real estate, maybe? Construction? Something like that.) He’d been married twice and had one daughter, his princess Sabrina. I met him once; he stared at me as if he were about to throw me off the balcony.

I knew exactly what he was thinking. I was not a good match for Sabrina. Not even as a friend, certainly, and definitely not as a boyfriend. Her lover? He’d have shot me dead if he’d thought that was even a possibility.

Luckily he knew his daughter better than that. Sabrina had taste and an appetite for wealth. Sabrina was not going to slum around with the likes of me.

No, our paths, mine and Sabrina’s, were crossing temporarily (it was a small program, we had no choice), but Sabrina, who was very beautiful and wore unimaginably nice clothes, was not from my world. She bragged about how expensive the wine was; I bragged about how cheap I’d gotten mine. She hung out with guys who claimed to have wine cellars with ten thousand bottles. I hung out with Roberto, who had found a store that sold bottles on deep discount because the labels were partially torn off.

And then there was the issue of origins. I was from Wisconsin with a stopover in Chicago. Sabrina, glorious Sabrina, hailed from from New York.

Or at least, that’s what she always said. She was actually from New Jersey. So what, who cared? New Jersey was very close to New York City and we were thousands of miles away. She was basically from there. I saw no reason not to give her credit.

Besides, didn’t I do something similar? At parties I’d say I was from Chicago (not Wisconsin) because it was easiest. It seemed fair because I was going to school there. With Italians, it kept things moving.

ITALIAN PERSON: Where are you from?

ME: Wisconsin.

ITALIAN PERSON: [blank look]

The two stare awkwardly at each other, then drift apart.

Far better to do it this way:

ITALIAN PERSON: Where are you from?

ME: Chicago.

ITALIAN PERSON [excited]: Chicago! Ah! Al Capone! [makes Tommy gun gesture with both hands] Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat!

ME: Exactly.

The two hug. Arms around each other, they head to the cellar in search of another bottle of red wine.

With Americans it was even worse:

AMERICAN PERSON: Where are you from?

ME: Wisconsin.

AMERICAN PERSON: Where in Wisconsin?

ME: A small town. You’ve never heard of it.

AMERICAN PERSON: Oh yeah? My [cousin/sibling/close friend] went to school there! I visited him!

ME: It doesn’t matter. I can guarantee that you haven’t heard of it.

AMERICAN PERSON: I might have! I JUST TOLD YOU MY [COUSIN/SIBLING/CLOSE FRIEND] WENT TO SCHOOL THERE!

ME: [Names town]

AMERICAN PERSON: What? I’ve never heard of it.

ME [shrugging]: Why did we just waste our time? I guaranteed it.

AMERICAN PERSON: Is that way up north? I never went way up north. Up by Canada?

ME: It’s thirty miles south of Madison.

AMERICAN PERSON: Wait, what? My [cousin/sibling/close friend] and I drove around there! We road tripped! It must be out of the way. Is it out of the way?

ME [shrugging]: It was always on my way.

That was my origin story: Wisconsin, blank stare. Chicago, excitement, Al Capone (pronounced “Ca-pone-ay,” of course) and rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. Who cared if I said one or the other? There were other things to talk about. Bottles of wine to drink. Merriment to be had.

And who cared if Sabrina said she was from New York? She could take a twenty-minute bus ride there from her house. That was good enough for me. From what I could tell, the whole tri-state area was basically an extension of the city, the way the planets in the solar system belong to the sun. (It’s the solar system after all.) Certainly she had grown up closer to New York than I had to Chicago, which was a couple of hours away.

Who cared where you were from? What mattered was where you were going.

That was my view, anyway. But for Sabrina, from was everything. For Sabrina, from was going.

And as Roberto was quick to point out, Sabrina didn’t just say “New York” and follow up with “New York area” or “just outside New York City.” No, she specified that she was from Manhattan:

PARTYGOER: Where are you from?

SABRINA: New York City.

PARTYGOER: Ah, cool! I’ve been there! Where in New York City?

SABRINA: Manhattan.

PARTYGOEER: Manhattan, wow. That’s awesome.

Sometimes that was enough. Other times people had some knowledge of New York and pressed further:

PARTYGOER: Manhattan, wow. That’s awesome. Where in Manhattan?

SABRINA: Near Columbus Circle.

PARTYGOER: Really. I know that area! What street exactly?

SABRINA [haughtily]: Just across the GW Bridge.

PARTYGOER: Across the…wait, what? That’s not Columbus Circle. That’s not even Manhattan! Across the… you mean you grew up in New Jersey!?

SABRINA [VERY haughtily]: Technically it’s New Jersey. But I can see Manhattan from my house.

Poor Sabrina. From “Manhattan…near Columbus Circle” to “technically New Jersey” was probably about five miles as the crow flies. And yet in her mind, and in the minds of everyone who mattered to her, the two were worlds away. It was the difference between the residents of the castle and the peasants who lived outside the moat, tilling the muck. Close but no princess.

I could see the tensions warring within her. But she was still a very rich peasant girl, from my standpoint. She and all of her friends had all of these gradations of status and wealth that meant nothing to me. And of course, my entire being meant nothing to them. I could not even pretend to be from somewhere they cared about.

Why put up with these snobs? I was fascinated by them, but that only goes so far. Sabrina was gorgeous, which went quite a bit farther, it embarrasses me to admit. She had a winning smile, if by winning you mean the particular sense of “declaring victory.” There was something deeply charismatic about the way she knew what she wanted and her determination to get it.

And of course, we were twenty—having a lot of fun—wine was flowing—parties—good food—it all leads to connections. And odd pairings. It seems normal at the time. Twenty! TWENTY!

Even so it surprised me when she started going out of her way to invite me to everything. I always brought Roberto with me; eventually she started asking him too. And there were always times, at every party, where her insufferable friends had dragged things to a halt, and she would look to Roberto and me to liven things up.

By “liven things up” I mean “make people spend five minutes talking about something besides themselves.” I also mean “no really, do something, guys, everyone here hates everybody else because nobody can say anything without bragging, and it’s ruining my party!”

You might think I’m exaggerating about the insufferableness of the jerks who came through Bologna that year. Am I? You tell me. One guy, an heir with a famous last name, turned up at one of Sabrina’s parties with his pet ferret riding on his shoulder. That’s how he was traveling through Italy. With his FERRET. Still think I’m exaggerating?

Why did Sabrina keep inviting us? At first it seemed like we were there because we spoke English and we gave those richies someone to feel superior to. They could relax because we posed no threat to them. Roberto the Hick would play the piano. Jacke the Rube would tell a few stories. The richies could sit in their smugness and stroke their ferrets.

But things started to change. One night as I was leaving, Sabrina came out to the hallway. “Jacke,” she said, “you have to come to every party I throw. Every single one.” And she kissed me on the cheeks—yes, it was the Italian custom and didn’t really mean anything, but the smell of her hair and the soft touch of her lips on my cheeks stuck with me nevertheless. As did the sight of her closed eyes as she pulled back (closed? really? how gentle and expressive!), then opened them with a big, genuine smile. A winning smile with a victory that (for once) included me as part of it. Or at least didn’t shut me out.

She almost looked sad as she returned to her guests. It was a powerful moment.

Hadn’t I seen a million movies like this? Glamorous woman realizes that an ounce of actual personality matters more than all that status mongering that was going on with her crowd? All that money, glitz, near-celebrity—none of that matters in the end, right? The Rube who wrote a poem (and was writing a musical!) had something those dandy heirs will never have! Sincerity! Common sense! Empathy! Love!

Why not me and Princess Sabrina? Why couldn’t the princess kiss the toad! Marry him even! Open doors!

At one of her dying dinner parties she called Roberto. “Where’s Jacke?”

“He’s right here. We’re writing our musical.”

“You have to come over. Both of you. Hurry.”

“But we’re working.”

“Please. I need you guys here, these dicks are going to kill each other.”

I should have capitalized the word dicks, not for emphasis but because she meant a crew of guys from Dickinson College, an East Coast school I had never heard of but that mattered to her. These guys, the Dicks, were passing through Bologna on their way to Florence, and the richest among them had decided to drop by Sabrina’s apartment.

“Guess we have to go,” Roberto said as he hung up the phone. “The Dicks are going to kill each other.”

“Would that be such a loss?”

“She’s using us,” Roberto said. “When this year is over, she’ll go back to that world. You know that, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s how it goes.”

He looked at me hard. One of the good things about having a friend from West Virginia is they are very in touch with reality. Reality is their state’s primary export after coal, which is basically two ways of saying the same thing.

And unlike me, he did go to the same college as Sabrina, back home. He had a better sense of what she came from and how difficult it would be for her to leave it. “She invites us to these things,” he said, “but don’t mistake that for affection. It’s still all about her. You and I are not her world.”

“Understood,” I said, wondering if he had ever in his life gone to the movies. No wonder he was struggling with the bouncy tunes.

“Her world can be summarized like this,” Roberto said wisely. “Money, status, and her. Not in that order.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, but it didn’t matter. In the end we went to the party. And it was true, there were five Dicks there, and it was immediately clear that these weren’t my people. They talked about lifting weights and doing blow and sailing competitions and how being from Manhattan beat being from Boston but being from Boston beat being from Brooklyn. I didn’t understand or care about a single thing they said.

Roberto sat down at the piano and started playing “Hava Nagila” several times through, faster and louder each time, adopting a tactic not unlike an elementary school teacher flicking off the lights to quiet a bunch of out-of-control kindergarteners, until the Dicks finally stopped talking about themselves. They shouted a few song titles at him, probably trying to stump him and assert some kind of superiority via their musical knowledge, but they had no chance. Roberto knew every song in the world and could play them all.

Then it was my turn. Roberto stood up to get some wine, and at Sabrina’s prompting, I told a few jokes. They were not stand-up jokes or one-liners or anything like that, just stories I had told before that had made her laugh. I think one was about my first Italian landlady, Signora Grande, who used to sit around watching television wearing only a bra and would always tell my friends who called that I was not there because she did not know my name. I did an impression of her answering the phone, then narrowing her eyes and saying “Jacke? Non c’è” (he’s not here) like a suspicious old crone even as I stood right next to her reaching out for the phone.

What can I say? It always got a laugh. I’m not trying to brag about this. Basically I was a monkey for Sabrina and her friends to laugh at. Why is that something to brag about? It was mildly humiliating, the way they sneered at me.

It was only Sabrina’s smile that kept me going. “Tell them about the lady who sells you bananas every day!” Sabrina cried, clapping her hands.

It was all part of the act. It’s why Roberto and I were there. We were the entertainment. I didn’t blame her: we had a real effect on the mood of the party. The Dicks felt no competition with us. They could breathe for a moment and watch the monkeys perform. They tolerated us and did not think worse of Sabrina for inviting us there: Okay, so you found these guys somewhere. They’re useful tools at parties, we see. Bet your dad hates their guts, ha ha ha ha ha, you’ll be marrying one of us and you know it, ha ha ha ha ha.

So I told the story about the woman who sold me bananas every day, which also involved an impression, and one of the Dicks jumped in. I could tell he was infatuated with Sabrina and angry that he was in competition with the other Dicks (though not with Roberto or me, of course). His anger and frustration were palpable in the way that only an extreme sense of entitlement can produce.

“Don’t you have better things to do than talk to that woman?” he demanded. “I mean, come on. Even for you.”

I didn’t understand. “Not really,” I said, thinking how true that was. Generally speaking, I had no better things to do than whatever it was I was doing at the time. (TWENTY!)

“You know what I mean. What are you going to get from her?” said the Dick.

I was confused. Hadn’t I explained this as part of the story? “I get a banana.”

“You’re talking to someone who sells bananas on the street. For a living. That’s all she does. Why are you wasting your time?”

“She’s nice.”

“She sells bananas!”

I honestly did not know how to respond to this. “I used to sell shoes,” I shrugged.

“My father sold his company last year!” Sabrina said. “For twenty million dollars!”

I couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t like it when things got heated, and she was trying to bridge the gap and move the conversation along, but I wasn’t offended and I certainly wasn’t afraid. I was too fascinated by this up-close view of wealth and privilege. Everything out of this Dick’s mouth was novel to me.

There were chuckles from the others, as if she had been mocking me for talking to the banana seller or perhaps for selling shoes myself. But hey: I could chuckle too. I sold shoes. Her father had sold his company for twenty million dollars. The juxtaposition was comical.

Twenty million dollars. A lot of money.  She had mentioned the figure many times, though I sometimes wondered if it was “near” that amount the way her hometown in New Jersey was “near” Columbus Circle. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have enough money to even pretend I had that much. Nowhere close.

Where are you from? Where are you going? The questions mattered to everyone in the room except me and Roberto.

Sabrina wasn’t smiling. She had a funny look on her face. She looked back and forth between us, between me and the Dick, as if she were trying to decide something. Usually she ignored snobbery, but this time it seemed to be bothering her. Maybe she was finally seeing it for what it was?

“And now you’re writing a musical!” she cried, trying to salvage the party or maybe, just maybe, to rescue me.

This prompted one of the other Dicks to begin bragging. His mom was on the board of some arts foundation, and she had met Andrew Lloyd Weber, the reigning King of Broadway.

Sabrina, to my surprise, stood up for me. “So what if she did? These guys are actually doing something,” she said. “Creating. Not just meeting people who create. And I think that’s awesome.” She smiled at me and Roberto. Roberto shrugged. I smiled back, falling a little deeper into whatever it was I had been feeling for her.

This was a great moment for Sabrina, as kind as I had ever seen her in six months. I was impressed that she stood up to him. Looking back, she may have been trying to undermine him for some nefarious purpose of her own, some secret striving I had not figured out. But at the time I took it differently, and I still think it’s possible that I was correct. It may have been the point where she recognized the problem with her tribe, and where her system of values had shifted. For a once she was siding with me. With me and my kind.

Her smile was at its most dazzling. “You’ll be on Broadway someday, Jacke,” she said with genuine affection. “I just know it. And I’ll come to the premiere.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Broadway. We’ll see you there.”

“And I’ll bring my aunt. She lives in Manhattan too. We’ll sit in the front row!”

I looked at my competitor, the braggart, whose expression had soured. Once again I was glad the door to the balcony was locked. I was, in that instant, triumphant, and he knew it as well as I did. I could hardly believe my good fortune. And—hadn’t I wondered about this? Hadn’t I spent several months thinking about Sabrina and all she represented, all the class and money and privilege, and wondered, well…maybe…maybe in real life, not the movies, maybe the princess would go for the frog, and maybe that was a good thing…maybe there would be a happily ever after for Jacke…

And then of course I blew it all.

I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did next. I started thinking about Sabrina and her aunt and what it would actually mean if Roberto and I pulled this whole thing off. A premiere? On Broadway? Jesus! My whole family would want to come. Probably twenty people right there.

And my friends! All my old friends, my childhood playmates, my high school friends, teammates, new friends from college. They’d want to come too. Are you kidding? A Broadway premiere? For a musical I had written? It would be huge! I’d fly them out!

Just how big was the front row in those theaters? How many people would I be able to fit? And Roberto too—he would have people. And the producers! And the stars!  Good lord. There wouldn’t be enough seats for everyone! I would probably have to put some people in the second row. Some very special people whom I had known for a long time. Tough choices would need to be made. Maybe my cousins? My grandmother? I would be breaking hearts left and right, telling  them they couldn’t sit in the front row!

I am aware that it made no sense to be thinking like this. And yet that’s exactly what I did.

And I didn’t stop there! My mind was racing. True, Sabrina was my friend now. Sort of. I could probably squeeze her in. But why the HELL would I put HER AUNT in one of these spots in the FRONT ROW? Just because she lived in Manhattan? (And I did not overlook that sly “too” that Sabrina had added. Classic Sabrina.) And that was it? Was “living in Manhattan” the SOLE reason to give some stupid aunt a seat in the FRONT ROW? Some magical pixie dust that falls upon all those who live in that sacred territory of Manhattan? Jesus, don’t those people get enough perks already? If I was in a position to hand out perks, me, Wisconsin Boy, the Monkey, why shouldn’t I give them to my football coaches, or my coworkers from the shoe store? Didn’t they need a few doors opened once in a while?

This happened in a second. Maybe two. Not more than that.

“Well…” I said to Sabrina, clearing my throat. “Maybe not the front row…”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, before I knew it, her friends all laughed at her, and her face turned bright red, and my face felt very hot too, and I felt like a horrible jerk.

How stupid could I be? Come on, a Broadway play? It was as if I had told a friend that I had just bought a lottery ticket, and the person politely said something like, “Hey great, and if you win the jackpot, I’ll help you celebrate with a steak dinner,” and then I  thought it through and said, “Well, you know, I might not get the money for a while, and there will be taxes, and I will probably have to evaluate all my options, including the charities I expect to give to…” Just agree to buy the damn steak dinner! Yes, you can have seats at the premiere—that’s what I should have said! Front row, Sabrina! You and your aunt, center stage! Orchestra seats! Cast after-party, of course! And afterwards we’ll jump in a cab and fly straight to the moon!

What kind of a jerk can’t just do that? Who’s that deluded? Or selfish? Who has to think it through?

Me, apparently. At least for those two seconds. But two seconds can matter!

Sabrina glared at me, more in shock than anger. The monkey had bitten her hand. Shock came first. Anger would of course follow.

Roberto shook his head in wonder. His eyes told me everything I needed to know. You thought it through. Jesus, Jacke. You actually thought it through.

Sabrina was done with me. No more fancy parties for the monkey. The monkey was out on the street, on his own, two steps ahead of the zookeeper. Sabrina could slum a little, but she could not be mocked. From then on, I had to drink cheap red wine with the degenerates. (My people!) No more pianos under chandeliers: back to the crummy apartment where we ate dinner in a windowless room and jammed a candle in an empty wine bottle for atmosphere.

Over the years I’ve spent many minutes thinking about those two seconds. Sabrina had extended herself, she had shown a side of her she had never shown before and never would again. She was twenty, goddammit. It was a door for her. I was the door.

And I had blown it. My life could have been different. And maybe hers could have, too, at least for a little while longer. It was a shame it didn’t happen.

But here’s the thing: although I’ve tried, I just can’t bring myself to feel too bad about denying Sabrina and her stupid aunt an imaginary front row ticket at our imaginary Broadway premiere. I tell myself that I should. But I don’t.

Sometimes it’s okay for doors to close. And some doors should be closed before they ever have the chance to be opened.

#

So many good objects from my time in Bologna, it was hard to pick! I might need to have one about the secret river that runs under the city, or the Janis Joplin Easter Egg. In the meantime you can run through the entire set by visiting the 100 Objects page or by following one of these links:

#11 – The Bench - a day in the furnace provides an object lesson
#10 – The Spitwad – a high school teacher confronts a bully, with a little help from the heavens
#9 – The Intersection - Hamlet Dad goes to the movies
#8 – The Burger Car – a father orders burgers with a slice of Proust
#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns a child’s dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from buying a motorcycle in Taiwan and learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and pays a visit to a therapist
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes a dramatic turn
#1 – The Padlock  - a doomed football coach struggles to survive a winless season

Other news: The reviews are in, and both The Race and The Promotion are finding their readership! I’m honored and flattered by the reception they’ve received, and impressed by how well the reviewers have gone straight to their core.

Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews calls it “an incredibly astute novella about ego and politics.” Another review of The Race (“warm and full of life”) can be found on mylittlebookblog. I also posted some follow-up thoughts.

My thanks to all reviewers. And for any reviewers still out there looking for material, just let me know – I have more review copies available! (And by “review” I mean blogs, Amazon.com, Goodreads, or the forum of your choice.)

Can we do an onward and upward from Italy? I think we can!

Image Credits: needcoffee.net, guidetomusicaltheatre.com

 

The Neuroscience of Lists

Ryan Shmeizer gives us 10 reasons why lists are so tough to resist:

In the end, we have what Charlie Munger calls the Lollapalooza Effect: when multiple psychological biases combine together in the same direction, the effect is compounded on a tremendous scale. It’s no wonder that Buzzfeed’s list of it’s 50 Best Posts of 2013 contains 37 posts that are themselves list. So don’t feel bad when your time drains into the black abyss of Buzzfeed, Medium Top 10 Lists, EliteDaily and 9GAG. You never stood a chance.

I didn’t give anything away by focusing on the end. The article itself is a pretty impressive list (yes, it’s of course presented as a list). I’d have thought of some of these (appeal to authority, false time constraints), but I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with all of them (dopamine neurons, memory palace).

I learned a lot from reading the article. The only thing you really need to know, though, is that People Love Lists.

Now who would be so craven as to appeal to this bias?

Really, who?

Onward and upward with a list (of sorts) from the great Harlan Pepper: