Our Shared Secrets: Encounters with the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver

Duke Altum here - bursting out from under six feet of dirt like Lemmy Kilmeister on his chopper!!

[If you don’t get that reference, that means you didn’t grow up in the glorious heyday of hair-and-leather metal bands and MTV’s The Headbanger’s Ball, so you wouldn’t remember Motorhead’s famous “Killed by Death” video. And I feel sorry for you.]

Anyway… imagine this: you are actually reading a post on this blog that was NOT written by Mutt Ploughman, the stalwart and hard-working writer who has singlehandedly kept The Secret Thread going while I have been engaged in pressing family and work matters. I want to thank Mutt now not only for keeping these pages fresh and interesting, but for his support of myself and my family while my daughter has been laid up following her cleft palate repair surgery. I am happy to report she is healing slowly but surely, and we are finally starting to get back into a more normal sleeping and eating routine with her. It’s not every day you wake up with one mouth and go to sleep with a totally reconstructed one! But she has pulled through remarkably well as only an 11-month-old, with no preconceptions or illusions, can.

Well. Even though I have been very conspicuously absent from these pages lately, the reading never, ever stops, as Mutt implied below. It’s a ravenous thirst that won’t be quenched. You simply make the time, one way or another – you don’t have a choice. In the past few months there have been many books I’ve wanted to write about here, most notably two novels written by Nobel laureates from very different parts of the world that I read back to back (Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World and Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – both, in an interesting coincidence, unconventional love stories set against the backdrop of emerging social and political revolution). But for this post I would like to offer some personal reflections on the short fiction of Raymond Carver, having just finished his powerful collection Cathedral.

I’d read a little bit of Carver here and there before, and by that I mean three or four stories at the most. So I really didn’t know much about his work beyond his well-known reputation for being a master of clean prose and brief, powerful short stories. He’s one of the leading figures in the so-called “Dirty Realism” school of writing, which seems to include writers known primarily for their short stories and for an economic, spare prose style: Hemingway, Tobias Woff, Richard Ford and others. What that’s supposed to tell you though is basically what it told me about his work: absolutely nothing. Except not to expect florid, lengthy, Thomas Wolfean sentences and descriptions.

Mutt has written extensively and eloquently here on TST over the past year or so about the nature of the short story, and attempted a critique on its current state in popular literary magazines. Both he and I have admitted a tendency to enjoy a more lyrical, descriptive writing style than you get from writers like those listed above. However, the more I read short stories, the more I have come to appreciate a more economic, terse style – and I think for me that comes from my fascination with the craft of poetry.

One of the things that intrigues me the most about poets is their uncanny ability to find just the right combination of words to capture what is essentially ineffable, and to do so without wasting even one. This is immensely difficult but when done well, delivers a knockout blow of awe and beauty akin to any masterwork of visual art.

Have you ever stood before a painting and thought to yourself, “I wouldn’t change one stroke of this thing, it’s perfect”? I was immensely fortunate once to visit Paris briefly, and I can distinctly remember standing before one of Monet’s paintings – Notre Dame cathedral reflected in the Seine River, awash with rose sunlight – and having that very thought. Not one brush-stroke or color highlight seemed out of place, and the overall affect was dazzling.

[Side note: I realize this is going to sound like ridiculous hyperbole, but I recently had more or less that same sensation – a genuine moment of awe – while re-watching for the third time the exquisite film Ratatouille with my sons… strangely enough the setting here is also Paris… but when I see some of the scenes in that film and pay attention to the details, my jaw literally hangs open at how beautifully rendered it all is. Down to the tiniest, most seemingly insignificant leaf or kitchen tile. And, while I’m at it: is there a more important and accessible film about the dignity and value of self-expression and having the courage and tenacity to follow one’s true calling than this one? It’s a perfect storm of sophistication (for adults), action (for kids), humor and sheer visual exuberance (for both).]

A great poem ought to strike the reader just like that Monet painting struck me: not one word out of place, the whole expressing an emotional truth that cuts through the clutter of your rational mind, right to the softer, wiser core of the heart. And the same, I think, is true of a great short story. In my experience, a great short story affects you more emotionally than it does intellectually or rationally.

A simple thought experiment may bear this out: if you think about the stories that have affected you most, more often than not what you remember about it is more like a feeling than a fact. The fear and dread and utter hopelessness is what lingers in your memory long after you’ve read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” I’ll never forget how my heart practically hurt with loneliness and an almost overwhelming sense of despair when I finished reading Breece Pancake’s devastating “A Room Forever.” And no one who reads the great Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” without recalling, almost viscerally, the mix of shock and disgust they felt when they read the final pages.

Carver himself made an interesting comment in an archived audio interview I had the pleasure of listening to recently: he opined that “the short story has more in common with poetry than it does with the novel.” As a prolific (and highly regarded) writer of both short stories and poems, he would know. For many years I’ve been sort of fascinated by this blurry line between the short story and the poem, and Carver’s comment, along with my reading of several of his finely-crafted pieces in Cathedral, has ignited that interest again. I may even attempt a few “experimental” pieces of my own that attempt to stake some sort of claim within this murky no man’s land between the two forms… I already have one in mind, based upon recent experiences waiting around in the hospital while my baby daughter was being operated on.

But this rambling and increasingly off-topic post was supposed to be about Carver’s short fiction, so let me offer a few reflections before they escape my memory (and your interest) entirely.

The very first thing that struck me about Carver’s stories is how easy they are to read. I blew through this book in a few sittings, and that’s saying something considered how hectic my schedule has been lately – I am not known for the speed of my reading either. He truly epitomizes George Orwell’s famous dictum: “good prose should be like a window pane.” Carver’s is impeccably clear, without a scratch or smudge. Again, not a wasted word to be found. In that same audio interview I referenced earlier, he said he had been instructed by the great novelist and story writer (and a personal favorite of mine & Mutt’s) John Gardner to take a 15-word sentence and then re-write it in ten. But then he went on to say that he made it his goal to say whatever had to be said in five. And that’s the essence of how he writes. You get what you need to know, and that’s it. Hardly any adornment or elaboration. He leaves that part of it up to you and your imagination.

It’s not only the sentences themselves that make use of this minimalistic style and leave room for the reader to fill in the details – the stories themselves, taken as whole units, are like brief glimpses into lives that, you sense, are much larger and more complex. I noticed several common elements in virtually all of the stories in this collection, which I thought was interesting. Some of them find their origins in Carver’s own life experience – for example, characters start drinking alcohol in every story, and usually to excess. The demon of alcohol that tormented Carver so much in his early life is always lurking around the corner here. Another aspect of his early life that comes up in every story is the broken marriage. Married life itself is a major theme in Cathedral and, I gather, in much of Carver’s fiction. But so many of the characters here allude to marriages that either had broken up or were about to, almost as if the author wanted to prove the utter impossibility of two people living happily together over the long haul. (Carver himself got hitched early at 19 and that marriage fell apart during his heavy drinking years, but he later found lasting companionship and happiness with the poet Tess Gallagher.)

I also noticed that in just about every story, the characters seem to be dealing with some kind of major crisis or situation, but then along the way the narrative will focus on one specific detail or event that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the larger issue at hand. And very often the story’s title will come from one of these side details that doesn’t seem to connect with the main thrust of the tale. So part of the intrigue and mystery for these stories, at least for me, was in trying to figure out how why this little detail was worth pointing out and what Carver was doing with it. Sometimes the connection was obvious, such as in the story “Where I’m Calling From” – the story’s narrator is spending time drying out in a rehab center, and he mentions those words when relating in an aside that he wants to call his ex-wife just to hear a familiar voice, but doesn’t want to reveal where he is.

One fascinating example of this technique (conscious or otherwise?) in Carver was in the penultimate story, called “The Bridle.” In it, a couple that loses their farm in Minnesota to foreclosure drifts down to this seedy apartment complex in Arizona, where they rent a room for several months. The husband, it is noted early on in passing, is a horse enthusiast who lost all of their money by buying and then betting on a race horse. One night they are hanging out with friends by the pool, getting drunk (see?), and the wife observes the husband – who, by the way, is unemployed – climb up to the top of a shed and attempt to jump into the pool. He doesn’t make it, and sustains serious head injuries. Shortly after they move out, and when the landlord is cleaning out their room, she finds a bridle the husband had brought with him in the closet. I have to rely from memory here so I’m paraphrasing, but in the final lines I recall Carver writes about the bridle being a burden and a restraint, but then observes that a horse fitted with one “knows at least that he’s going somewhere.”

In that one line towards the end of the story, Carver takes this small detail that seemed to have only an incidental relationship to the tale being told, and illuminates it – but only for a split second, like a lightning flash. Again, it’s up to us to think about what we saw, and ponder why it’s significant.

My point in all this is that Carver seems to be able to use this minimalist approach not only for the sake of brevity or clarity, but also to hint at larger mysteries. Somehow his spare style is an invitation for us to enter into the lives he’s writing about, almost as if the space left by the omitted words provides access for his readers to seep through the membrane of the page and into this other world. He employs a true artist’s deft touch to share with us just the right thought or physical detail that will give us a glimpse behind the curtain, but not spoon-feed us any insights. We bring to these characters our own life experiences and hard-earned wisdom, and we can recognize in their struggles and disappointments (and, occasional moments of hope) the common burden of being human.

In short, what Carver wrote when he reviewed his friend Tobias Wolff’s first collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs applies equally to himself: “He has somehow gotten his hands on our shared secrets, and he’s out to tell us everything he knows.” Raymond Carver is one writer who has successfully mined the ore of his own life, especially his early struggles, to produce subtle, nuanced stories that you'll read in one sitting, but savor for far, far longer.

Not Dying Today

Talk Amongst Yourselves

I’m sure our legions of dedicated readers are wondering at this very moment what the heck has become of the semi-regular, wit-crammed, intelligent posts on this blog from the likes of your humble scribe and the creator/founder of this blog, Duke Altum. No doubt hundreds of you are suffering from withdrawal and probably breaking out in hives at the suspense of not knowing more about how the strenuous progress of my first “novel” is coming along (poorly, see below). And other subsets of you are surely holding side-meetings and online colloquies to discuss the apparent demise of Duke’s “Poem of the Month” series, much-admired in the (way)underground channels of the literary world, and lamenting the death of his occasional posts on whatever corner of the world he has conquered in his international reading. (Don’t believe me? Two words: Rabindranath Tagore.)

Well, the good news is that reports of this blog’s death have been wildly exaggerated. We’re not going away. But “real life” still has a way of imposing itself on grownups, especially those of us who are responsible for little kids, and both Duke and I have been pulled away from this page recently to focus our attention on other pressing matters unrelated to literature and film anyway, if not the spiritual life.

Poor Duke Altum, the driving force behind and surely the soul within this blog, was already getting thumped repeatedly in his “day job” before recent events, but is now doubly taxed with the far more important and emotionally burdensome task of helping to guide his 11-month old baby daughter through a grueling recovery period following a scheduled surgical operation. Anytime you put any loved one’s well being in the hands of doctors, however accomplished, there is certainly an element of nerves involved. But with a child young as his daughter is, it’s that much more of an emotional journey. Needless to say, The Secret Thread wishes Duke’s daughter all the best for a speedy and complete recovery, and we trust that with God’s help and Duke and his wife’s unconditionally loving care, she is already well on her way there. Good thing Duke was boning up on how to raise girls right (see “What We’re Reading”, left) before this occurred so that he can be there body and soul for his little woman of the future. No doubt Duke will one day, hopefully soon, make a triumphant return to this page with a new film review or post on one great book or another.

As for the present scribe, unfortunately my novel has hit the skids yet again. This time some external pressures in my life are really impeding on my creativity and fictional writing process to the extent that I have been forced to “table” the current chapter until I feel a little better grounded to continue. This is the first time I have really felt that way about this story. Many times I have hit what felt like a blockage but I didn’t think it was a large enough problem that I couldn’t muscle through it. But 2009 has been a difficult year in my household for private reasons, and I have discovered that even the little time I have to devote to developing my writing craft has to be sacrificed more frequently than I want it to be. So be it; I am responsible for my own household. It’s a hard thing to feel like I have devoted three years to writing this story only to reach a temporary place where I cannot continue. But it is nonetheless the case, and what I need to do is focus on overcoming some of the burdens that have put me here.

Me and a Girl

Nonetheless, if you know me, you know that I am not able to completely stop doing some form of creative writing. The day I do that, you can lay me in the ground and cover me up; it’s over. And while I am unable to get into and sustain a long-term fiction project for the moment, I can at least report that I am hard at work – although I have even less time to devote to it – on a shorter piece of writing that falls into, I guess, the critical essay category. Once again I find myself writing a serious piece about a musician who has made an impact on my creative life, following two previous critical essays, both of which were published, on singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee (“Lonesome Traveler”, Rock & Sling, Winter 2006) and The Innocence Mission (“Hope on the Wing”, The Other Journal, Issue #11, August 2008).

This time though, maybe for the first time in a nonfiction piece I have written, I am taking on a subject that I do admire and respect artistically, but that I do not find myself sympathetic towards in terms of their worldview/attitudes/beliefs. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write about an artist that I had difficulty connecting with on moral grounds but still found myself drawn towards. And I found the perfect subject for this in my new piece, tentatively titled “Me and a Girl: Investigating my Abnormal Attraction to the Music of Tori Amos”.

I’ve been listening to Tori Amos’ music for about 15 years. I have always enjoyed a great deal of it, and have marveled at her astounding musical and composing abilities as well as her fierce independence and creative audacity over the years. In terms of pure creative gifts, I believe she is arguably a genius. She has always taken risks and stretched the boundaries of what one would expect from just one woman and her piano, and those are aspects of her career I can look upon with admiration. However, anyone who spends any time listening to Tori’s music knows that she is very aggressively anti-religion, and provocative in most senses of the word. She is famous for her passionate and complicated femaleness, her spacey lyrics, her vehement posture against what she perceives to be the “Patriarchy”, and her semi-suggestive physicality in live performance.

Tori Amos goes to uncommon lengths to hold onto a life-long grudge against organized religion and continually hammers on what many Christians in particular hold to be sacred in her lyrics and public statements. Yet at the same time she is a self-described “daughter of the Christian Church”, having been raised by a Baptist minister. One story about her is instructive: when her father got after her for never writing a Christmas song or even sending a Christmas card, she suggested that a much-discussed photo of her suckling a piglet in the CD booklet of her 1996 album Boys for Pele was as close as she was ever going to get to fulfilling that wish for him. (What that may have to do with Christmas is classic Tori.)

And lest you think she has mellowed with age, this is her discussing some of the motivation behind her latest record, Abnormally Attracted to Sin (as if this doesn’t prove the point!), from her website: “I'm a minister's daughter. The power of the church is insidious, and it permeates everything. A lot of what the Church discusses is not about the compassionate path of Christ, it's about what kind of lifestyle is acceptable and approved of by the Church when god knows what they're doing behind closed doors.”

Those who know me know that I do not subscribe in any way to this point of view. So why spend time being inundated by it? For me it’s three-fold: 1. it’s to get outside of my “comfort zone” as a writer, writing about people who do not share my ideas. In that sense it’s a literary exercise. 2. Although I find a lot of her ideas unappealing and offensive, and even feel resentment towards her for her sweeping generalizations about religious communities, I am still considerably drawn towards her music, and want to explore why. 3. I have a theory that there may be a kind of Hazel Motes-quality to Tori Amos, for where would she be if she had never had men or “the Church” to hammer against? And who spends an entire career pounding on the same ideas they feel opposition towards without also spending a lot of time contemplating those ideas, thinking about those ideas, and indeed being engaged, even negatively, by those ideas? Is Amos’ journey a real-life search for the “Church of Christ Without Christ”, as Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes put it in Wise Blood? What is really going on in her art, anyway?

These are the answers I am seeking in my writing about her. I may not find them, for Tori Amos is an extremely complicated and tough nut to crack, but going after them is a challenge, and writers have to take on these challenges. Sometimes your subjects choose you, and you have to accept the gauntlet if they hurl it down in front of you.

Wish me luck.

Buried in the Railroad Earth

For a number of years when I was younger – let’s say from around 1995 to 2001 – there were few writers, if any, whose work affected me as profoundly as the work of Jack Kerouac, the mercurial, hard-living, enigmatic American scribe most famous for writing the classic 1957 novel On the Road. That book and many others have stayed with me ever since that period. I’ve always assumed that literally thousands of young men (and perhaps young women, but it’s less clear) who ever harbored literary aspirations since Kerouac was with us have probably felt the same about this man’s writing.

There have been many, many books and essays written about Kerouac, and probably any one of them can offer a more coherent literary analysis than any thought I can offer to the reader here. But I have recently had occasion to reconsider his work, and it came to me as a complete surprise, allowing me to discover again, almost freshly, the resonance Jack Kerouac’s words have had through my life since 1995.

I don’t remember exactly how I first got onto Kerouac. I suppose I had heard enough about On the Road over time and was starting to get interested in literature and eventually decided that as a single young man, the definitive novel about getting in a car and high-tailing it several times across the United States with a couple of buddies for kicks was something I ought to read. It didn’t matter that the trips were taken in the late 40s and the book wasn’t published until 1957. Something about that concept of spontaneously blowing cross country with your pals has natural appeal to young men without many ties, still savoring their first true taste of personal liberty. I didn’t have a whole lot of liberty, however, because I was a soldier, and therefore sworn to do whatever Uncle Sam wanted me to. But I didn’t have a family, and I did have some crazy dreams, most of which were destined never to be realized; some of which actually would be, but only later.

Oh man, but I would think if you were a young man in your twenties, and an American on top of that, and starting to develop literary aspirations on top of that, then you couldn’t avoid running smack into Kerouac. Who else had ever laid down what it meant to be young and free in the United States of America better than he did? Who else had ever written so crazily and so knowingly about the holy longing inside of us all, the desire to see things, the thirst to know things, the need to understand everything?

So at some point I decided that I had to take on Jack Kerouac’s writing. And I suppose I felt that I needed to begin at the beginning. So I bought a paperback copy of the first novel he published, in 1950, called The Town and the City. I had no idea what it was about, and if you were to suggest to me at the time that it was more or less a knock-off of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, that is an idea that would not have found purchase in my mind because I didn’t know who Wolfe was and had never heard of that book either. I knew The Town…. was a big book, and that was fine by me. And I also knew that I had planned to visit New Orleans, on my own, over a three-day weekend, so I decided to bring Jack with me.

This was the end of August, 1995. I can distinctly remember sitting in a coffee shop at an outdoor table in the Garden District across from one of those cemeteries with the above-ground graves sipping on a coffee and reading Kerouac, feeling like much the Bohemian, but also feeling like I was trying too hard to appear sophisticated. Good thing nobody was paying any attention.

I remember the little boy in the story accompanying his fedora-wearing father to the race track and proudly placing bets. I remember the drawn-out death of that father in the novel, a figure so central to the forlorn spirit of the book; also representing a parallel to Thomas Wolfe’s earlier story. I remember the mangled dog tags belonging to the protagonist’s brother being discovered by Japanese soldiers in some Asian theater of World War II, after the body that wore them had been obliterated. I remember the sadness I felt when I came to that scene. I remember the very first words of the novel: “The town is Galloway….”, a thinly-veiled facsimile, I would learn much later, of Kerouac’s own provenance of Lowell, Massachusetts.

I don’t remember very well my first reading of On the Road, which came next. It was probably also in 1995. But I do recall the overall effect, which was one of total immersion into my own crazed dreams, as though Kerouac’s fictionalized chronicle had opened up a huge door within myself. As I imagine happened to so many others, the book landed on me like a bomb. I started journaling even crazier thoughts (I had been journaling since college), and, inevitably, began the regrettable imitation of Kerouac’s fiction that probably so many other young writers have done. I made a mix tape for my brother called “We Lean Forward to the Next Crazy Venture Beneath the Skies”, a direct quote. I remember puzzling like everyone else did over the famous question Kerouac poses towards the end of the novel, “Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?” I remember how Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in the novel said “Whoo-wee!” all the time.

I remember a whole first “novel” I started to write called “No Wonder You Look Tired” (honest to God!) that I managed to keep working on until 1997, when I lost about ¾ of the manuscript in an armed robbery in Philadelphia. Later I even changed the name of the novel to The Sound of Diamonds, which was, again, stolen from Kerouac ("Silence is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything.") The entire story grew out of a broken heart, and it was a pitiable Kerouac imitation from top to bottom. It was painful to lose the fruits of that struggle at the time, but I think I can render the final assessment that this was the most appropriate fate for that particular story. (Incidentally, I still have the first 50 pages or so, handwritten. They’re atrocious!)

Later I read On the Road again, and I still own the version I bought back in ’95. I am quite sure I’ll read it a third time.

Then there was the book that really got to me – even more than On the Road – a little pipsqueak of a novel Kerouac wrote around 1953 called Maggie Cassidy. It wasn’t published until later, after On the Road made him a literary sensation. To this very day it is my favorite Kerouac novel and will always be one of my favorite books. It was probably the major inspiration behind that early attempt at a novel I mentioned, although, I need not point out, Kerouac’s book was much better than my efforts. This novel also influenced later writings of mine, including a collection of eleven unpublished short stories called A Son of the Suburbs written between 2002 and 2005, and in particular two stories called “The Fountain of Agonies” and “Poison Summer”.

Maggie Cassidy doesn’t seem to be remembered as one of Kerouac’s better novels by the critical establishment. For me, however, the book was seminal. It didn’t have much of a plot – few Kerouac novels do – and I can see why it wouldn’t appeal to everyone, since it’s about a high school girlfriend written from a boy’s broken-hearted point of view, with a decidedly nostalgic flavor. But it really slammed into me where I was at that time in my life. The language was beautiful, filled with longing and anguish. To me the words felt like my own thoughts and inexpressible ideas, all coalesced right there on the page. Even though it was dated, and its author seemed to pine for a time which for me was a vanished America, never to be experienced, the sentiments and the crushed-soul emptiness expressed in the novel resonated through every part of me. I felt like I had once loved young Maggie. As with On the Road, I remember certain turns of phrase – the boy in the novel fixing his gaze on “the swan of her neck”, for example – and I also recall the exuberant and sometimes infantile cajoling between the main character, Jack Duluoz (Kerouac’s alter ego in many novels), and his pals, talk about beaning each other with baseballs, etc. From the moment I read this novel, it struck a chord in me that still sustains in spite of the fact that my circumstances have changed tremendously since that time and continue to do so. I’ve read that book twice too and am seriously considering a third run. It would be interesting to read now that I have two young daughters.

After Maggie Cassidy I was hooked into Kerouac, and felt a kinship with him in spite of how divergent his life and lifestyle had been in relation to what my own were. I went on to read other books: Visions of Gerard, a moving, short novel based on his relationship with his dead older brother, who passed away at age nine from an illness; Lonesome Traveler, a kind of half-short story, half-essay collection about his various travels in America doing odd jobs, the title of which I later purloined for a profile I published of the singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee in Rock & Sling magazine; Desolation Angels, an amazingly-titled later “novel” (by the end of his career the line between fiction and nonfiction had blurred considerably in Kerouac’s work) which revisited some earlier terrain but with a wiser, more visionary eye and considerably more free-association-style prose. (By this time Kerouac had fallen under the influence of Zen Buddhism and had a far more mystical outlook on the world.)

Speaking of titles, Kerouac was always my favorite in the art of naming his books, and other titles of books he wrote which I have not read still marked me in their own smaller way – books like Old Angel Midnight, Mexico City Blues, Pomes All Sizes, and my favorite in the title stakes, The Sea is My Brother.

And so it went. After the year 2001 or so my infatuation with Kerouac waned slightly, but the inspiration he gave me, the insatiable hunger his language sparked within my gut to write my own mad dramas, has never left me, ever, since those earlier times. His influence lingered in my writing, as I have explained, as it did elsewhere. When I attended The New School in New York City to pursue a master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1998, I met a writer named Hettie Jones, who knew Kerouac personally and had authored a memoir called, unabashedly, I Am Hettie Jones. She was a graying, former Flower Child-type, but I remember speaking with her at some faux-intellectual cocktail party and listening to her account of Kerouac coming upon her and a girlfriend in a pub and wrapping them both together in his arms in one massive bear hug, shouting his greetings. My twin brother and I still quote and make reference to Kerouac regularly, as though he were another brother whose words and memories were integral to our own.

Thus we come to last weekend, when I, now a somewhat chubbier, less energetic, but still literary (or so I like to think) husband and father of three small children, rolled out with my family to attend a wedding of my wife’s cousin in northwestern Massachusetts. Being a husband, and a man who is not all that into weddings in the first place, I had barely been paying attention to where this wedding would be taking place. I just knew I had to be there for it and we had to bring all three kids. Only a few days before we left, it occurred to me, probably by listening closely to my wife, that we were going to Lowell. And it hit me then: Wait a minute. Lowell, Massachusetts? As in, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac? As in, the “town” in The Town and the City? As in, the setting for Maggie Cassidy? Yes, that Lowell.

It was then that I knew, absolutely, without question, that I had to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave, for I knew he had been buried back there, even though his death occurred in 1969 where he had been living at the time, near Orlando, Florida. Lowell was really the only place you could have interred Jack Kerouac. It had made such an impression on his soul as a youth – a reality so beautifully and sorrowfully played out in his earlier novels, as Lowell was an industrial town filled with smog, ramshackle row homes, and hard-working, humbled Americans struggling to get by.

The morning of the wedding, we made our way with a group of attendees, my wife’s family and friends, to a place called The Owl Diner in Lowell – the sort of wondrous, small-town eatery that has amazing, home-made food and a cramped, manic atmosphere that you might call “local flavor”. It was the site of a truly delicious breakfast and some fun conversation. Across the way from where I sat, outside the window, I could glimpse a few bedraggled row-homes, with sagging porches and peeling paint, and I thought about Jack Kerouac and the children running through the streets of the Lowell he had painted for me there many years before.

While I was putting away a huge platter of corned beef hash, listening to people talk, taking turns with my wife to hastily shove scraps of food towards my one-year-old son in the hopes that we would be quick enough to stave off his bellow for more vittles, I finally said, “I’m sorry, I have to do it.” I pushed back from the table and approached a young waitress. “I know this sounds ridiculous,” I said, “but I really love Jack Kerouac’s books, do you know if he is buried here?” I knew he was, but it was a way to kick it off. She gave me a look that said, “Whatever”, but said she wasn’t sure. An older woman, however, seated nearby, said to me, “Oh yes, I’m sure he is. Isn’t he in the such-and-such cemetery…..”

A beefy, Good Will Hunting­-looking dude, decked out in a white apron stained with grease from the food he’d been slinging in back moments before he evidently went on break, and who called me “guy”, said he would go find out fawr me. A few minutes later he came back to our table, tapped my shoulder, and said, “He is buried here, guy. Edson Cemetery.” I thanked him for his neighborly spirit and his, well, good will.

From there it was all my brother-in-law’s iPhone. He is not necessarily of the literary persuasion, but he is a darn good sport, and generous, for he knew it meant something to me. I tell you, that man had located Edson Cemetery, found directions, committed them to memory, and was ready with his car to whisk me over there as soon as we got back to the hotel all within about 20 minutes. Just like the commercials, I was thinking.

It turns out, by some “coincidence” – which I don’t know if it’s too out of line to call Providence – Jack Kerouac’s grave was located only 1.5 miles from where we were staying. I know Kerouac was no saint. But he was a child of God, and a Catholic (a bond I actually can claim with him), and he wrote words which really had marked my life, as I was rapidly recalling with more clarity with each passing moment.

My hard-charging bro-in-law brought me straight to the man’s gravestone. We disembarked from his car. We were standing in a lovely, bucolic cemetery, very large, set in the middle of southern Lowell, with many streets stuffed full of those same tired row-homes right there within view. There was a gentle breeze and a lazy, unoppressive sunshine filtering through large, leafy, obviously well-aged trees. A stout fellow wearing a green Vietnam-era soldier’s blouse and baggy shorts was standing nearby looking at the ground. I knew we were in the right place. As we set off down the gravel pathway this guy turned and said to us, “Are you here to see Jack?” I said we were, and we exchanged some brotherly/literary pleasantries, paying homage to the man below.

And there, marked with a simple, unassuming rectangle of grey stone, was Jack Kerouac’s final resting place. We stood before it and I was startled with the knowledge that right there, beneath what he once described, in Lonesome Traveler, as “the railroad earth”, were the bones of this man, this seeker, this honest scribe of the American heart. In front of the grave, pressed firmly into the earth, many previous visitors, writers, fellow dreamers, had deposited pens and pencils. Some of them had little notes with them, impaled into the ground, upon which, one presumes, the writers had paid their final respects. I didn’t have a pen with me, but my brother-in-law stepped in again: he had an automatic pencil in his car. I smiled to myself: the automatic pencil, as those close to me know, is my writing instrument of choice. He handed it over, and I stuffed it into that same railroad earth.

It was endearing to me to see his childhood nickname on the grave, which as Kerouac readers know was “Ti Jean”, from his French-Canadian ancestry. His full name, as inscribed in the stone, was JOHN L. KEROUAC. But it wasn’t until I saw the epitaph that I was actually moved, for it must be the simplest, pithiest, yet most accurate epitaph I can think of for anyone.

It reads, “HE HONORED LIFE.”

Today I honor him.

Job 4:18

A Fiction

PART TWO
[To read Part One, click HERE.]

Entering the small church, I found myself on one end of a long, narrow corridor, which seemed to me to follow the same route as the center aisle in the nave overhead. On either side of the hallway there were doors here and there that seemed to lead into smaller chambers, classrooms and meeting areas, decorated with colored paper on which small children had crayoned in scenes from Sacred Scripture.

Seeing these wonderful pictures made me laugh. Adult humans, especially in this country, are constantly asserting that they don’t ‘believe’ in miracles because they’ve never seen any. What they don’t understand is that they can probably see them in their homes much of the time. The small children receive the Word in places like this one, and it takes root in their hearts. There it blossoms into spectacular visions: these are what wind up on sheets of colored paper. When pure love meets with innocence, there is a spiritual combustion.

You sightless men and women, I thought, windows into Heaven gape all around you.

From the opposite end of the hall the music trailed out into the air like incense; I breathed it in and followed after. The last door on the right side was ajar. I approached and filled the open space with my large form. A woman in a white sweater and a long skirt sat with her back towards me at a much-maligned piano, dutifully tapping out notes, her head bobbing up and down in an ongoing effort to coax the music from the throats of the innocents surrounding her.

The little children sat in a neat semi-circle around the piano, their bruised limbs curled beneath them, hands benignly folded, faces canted towards the nodding adult, wide eyes spilling over with hunger for direction …

One small child in particular saw me first, a moment before the others, it may have lasted for half a second – but in that one glance so much occurred. She revealed her nature to me – I could see she was pure, of course; but also called, destined to drag God’s beacon forward into the yawning mouth of darkness for the rest of her life. At the same time I felt part of myself fly unto her, and I knew that the very moment she laid her eyes on me she was seared with what some have called the White Burn, the permanent mark of the Heavenly encounter as experienced on earth, like the Mark of Cain but with a positive signature, caused by the same force that discolored Moses’ skin when he came down from Sinai. I am not the Master, but I do carry within me some of His Light.

This small child’s eyes shuttered open, an instantaneous reverse eclipse; then all of the children were gasping and squealing, some of them gawking openly, some hiding behind one another. The woman turned and saw me and her face blanched. I saw and felt her strength waver; she could offer no protection from me and she knew it.

In moments of extreme crisis on earth, such as war, acts of terrorism, natural disasters and so forth, it has been revealed to us through observation that the human character responds to decisiveness. A soldier on the leading edge of battle may stand next to a comrade of three years in one minute and in the next minute he may find himself surrounded by human detritus. At such times the best thing is a directive. Grab your weapon and fall back. Return fire. Attack!

The woman in front of me had arrived at her own version, in one sense, of such a moment. She knew what I was but at the same time she disbelieved what she knew. So I moved in and said the exact same thing we told the shepherds on the night of the Master’s birth. Fear not.

I had come for them. I knew that now, although I hadn’t before. The woman simply had not been called to receive the same message. So I spoke to her, quietly, and said to leave the children with me, for they are safe, and to go join the others outside that I knew would be gathering even then. They will ridicule you for what you say and criticize you for what you have done, I told her, but in your eyes they will see the Truth, which is you had no choice.

With her gone I moved forward in the small room on to an oval of colored carpeting and the trembling children, bested by their blameless curiosity, came to me and surrounded me, and because of my own nature, I slowly, painstakingly unfolded my battered wings, white feathers trailing from them like snowflakes on the desert floor, and held them out high over their tiny heads. They drew in, nine of them, as though my light gave them warmth; a few of them placed their hands on my translucent skin and shuddered as they felt the vibration of the eternal chord within my very form. It was exquisite.

We stayed that way for a time. I prayed for them and I praised the Master for allowing me to fulfill this extraordinary calling. Then I sat down right among them, so close I could feel their warm breath. They crawled, surged, pulsed around me. Their thirst was palpable.

Then the little girl, the beautiful child God had chosen to speak for them – the one God had marked with the vision of me – said:

Tell us about God.


… the door of the church is opening and the schoolchildren are coming out! There you can see – here we go – a single-file line coming out of the front of the church. And they seem to have their coats on and everything, as though someone had organized them and sent them out for recess … now, the parents … look at the obvious relief there in the body language of the civilians gathered on the other side of the police barricade … now the police or the FBI or whoever is represented by those armed men in SWAT gear, the first one has come forward to receive the children …. Janet, can you see anything more?

—Karen, unfortunately I am closer to the other side of the building, where the authorities have also been monitoring the back door, where the suspect went in … now, there, I can see the children up on the front grass. There seems to be a great collective sigh of relief down here that the suspect has released these little children, although no one really knows—

—Whoa! There, suddenly – now the suspect is coming out the back of – what is that!!

—Oh my God! Bob, get this …. over here!

—Look at that! Folks, as you can see, someone has emerged from the back of the church, dressed in white, wrapped in some kind of sheet or cape – vestments! could those be vestments!? – he’s making his way quickly on foot, very fast – he’s heading right for the police cruiser ….

—Karen, this is Janet, it’s erupted into chaos down here, a man in white, cloaked in something, has come out of the church, and the authorities are literally shooting at him – you can see the muzzle flashes I’m sure – Jesus, Bob, take cover!

—The police and federal folks are now firing on the suspect, who is running head down and underneath some kind of white cape or shield–
­
—Karen, I can see the man now. That is no cape or shield. Holy God.

—What did you? ... straight at one of the police vehicles, where now the sus—

—­My God!

—Oh! Oh! Oh! The suspect literally flung the officer to one side, with great force, and is now trying to squeeze himself into the police vehicle ... the branches are partially obscuring the overhead shot – Janet?

—Karen, the man, or whatever this thing is, he overtook the officer, who was literally shooting at him at the time, just, I don’t know, cast him aside, and has now apprehended the police vehicle … my cameraman got it, I don’t know if viewers are seeing his pictures—

—Janet, could you tell, did he have anything underneath the shield or cover—

—Wings, those were wings. Look out, Bob!

—The police car now containing the suspect, you can see, has launched straight forward, careening right over the lawn towards the front of the church, total disregard for anyone’s safety including his own – there you see – right past the police barricade, wildly back onto the road, several police vehicles already turning after him – we’re going to have a chase —


I sent the children forward, no harm done to anyone, but they met me with bullets. A fear-filled response—unsurprising. I enclosed my entire body when I came out, for protection and concealment, though it did little to achieve either. They cannot stop me with their projectiles, of course, but my wings were now riddled with them, perforated, and I could feel the wounds, the tears in my skin, the feathers torn and trailing away. Fragments of metal, burning, embedded into my tissue. It’s always the first reaction—especially among these totalitarian squads they deploy—the general approach is to begin by shooting and allow things to work themselves out from there.

Bouncing over the grass, avoiding the graveyard, my only purpose now was to put distance between myself and all of those conflicted souls with their murderous instincts … how do they arrive at these places from the small, pure creatures they are at the beginning, among whom I had just spent wondrous moments in communion?

Peripherally, I could see those little children falling into the arms of their mothers, their fathers, after I sent them out. Take care of them, you jaded people, let them live and breathe…you will notice the White Burn on their cheeks and you will know the power of the Lord.


Now I am back on a road driving this vehicle as fast as it goes, and they are giving chase, absurd horns blazing and so forth, they want me stopped, they want me contained. So they can do what? Inflict violence on me for some crime they believe I have committed? I have already been sentenced by the true Judge. Your human ‘justice’ whimpers its meaningless decisions to a courtroom filled with cackling corpses. Your purported authority, which has never been your own but mere illusion, went up in smoke the first time one of you had the gall to cite it.

The howling, screeching sounds and the speeding vehicles have affixed themselves to my trail. It is useless. I will outrun you all, and make my way unimpeded into exile. This is a huge, sprawling wasteland in some places, this earth; I know where to hide where you will not find me. But I helped some innocent creatures, I gave them knowledge that is not of this world …


… we now have images from several helicopters that have converged on, or over, the scene. As you can see there we have at least ten police and military vehicles in pursuit of one police car that contains the suspect who earlier on this very tense and chaotic morning closed himself inside of a church with nine nursery school children, only to release them less than an hour later with no harm. He sent the children out one end of the church, then slipped out the other side, ran through a virtual hail of gunfire to a nearby squad car, wrestled away the officer there, and appropriated the vehicle. That was the start of this high speed chase you see in these startling live images.

As you know if you’ve been tuned in, there is all kinds of speculation as to exactly who, or do I even say what, this suspect is … I don’t think there’s any question that there will be a great deal of ongoing discussion and a reviewing of the pictures from earlier to try to determine what exactly has happened here today. And whether we were capturing video of what was truly a hostage situation or whether it was actually something else entirely, something that has never been seen before, at least not during the cable news era, when we can break stories as they happen …. Janet, your thoughts?

—Thoughts, Karen? …. I … I’m not prepared to make any final assessments on the air, not at all … I know I saw something I have never seen anywhere before, that is for sure … I think it’s like you said, Karen, that there will be a lot of reviewing the footage, and I think that when people actually study the images .. well, the cameras don’t lie, do they.

—No, Janet … they never do … meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, the suspect has made his way onto a freeway, there you see below the squad car moving extremely recklessly, with a huge armada on his trail, an endless stream of flashing lights, and I’ve just been told that the police have set up a roadblock a few miles ahead. So we may be witnessing the final scenes of this high speed drama ….


Faster, faster, they are all coming with the vehicles of retribution, persecution, when I have brought harm to no one, only good. The Master said this would happen. He said those who are hated because of Him would be blessed. And I feel the strength that brings, the power and the glory of that blessing, the self-assurance that is the right of the anointed. Now I understand: it was never banishment: this was my time to make myself known, for I was not selected on earlier occasions. It was not I who marched into Sodom and tore its structures down forever. It was not I who told those shepherds to fear not. It was not I who came to administer to the Master while he danced with starvation on those desert peaks.

But now it is clear my time has arrived, and I have seized it, I gave those children new life at their tender ages, I praise Him for letting me know what it means to mark souls for all time! Would that I had understood before what this would be like. I would have waited with more patience, conducted myself with more grace, more righteousness … but the Lord had plans for me, larger than I imagined ….

Here, now, I grip this ridiculous wheel with new vivacity, unalterable zeal, unassailable single-mindedness. Yet what is this I see before me: they have brought more vehicles together. I see a few people standing and a few kneeling down; are some of them training their guns upon me again? They have cobbled together a ramshackle wall. Do they not remember what God does to man’s walls?

I can only laugh, and I do so now, largely, loudly, and because of who I am my laughter mutates into song, and my voice bellows within the confines of this clunking chamber with its garish lights. It is the sound of a multitude; there is no silencing it. And while my song ascends my foot descends, suppressing the pedal all the way to the floor of this rolling mausoleum. Here come the vehicles, hurtling forward, see the tiny men scatter and hear them whinny with terror, here now is their pathetic wall. Give way to God’s fist!

Job 4:18

A Fiction

PART ONE

Banished. The Lord God sent me hurtling through the firmament. I felt nothing as I breached the outer layers of gas and bits of rock and other debris, but then as I fell further a bracing wind assaulted me. I plunged through a glittering bowl of crystalline moonlight. Finally my curved back sliced a decaying woodshingled roof over something, like a scimitar flung through a thatched hut. I slammed into a rusted metal vat and fell forward onto a dirty floor littered with leaves and broken glass.

The air was freezing, the darkness absolute. Although it is something we are conscious of and must also negotiate, physical pain such as human beings endure is not experienced by my kind in the same way, so I was able to climb to my knees, then stand. We don’t bleed. But that does not mean we are not susceptible to damage.

In terms of motor capabilities, however, all was well – except for my wings. A few cautious attempts to spread them revealed that they were shattered, irrevocably impaired, and would be of no more use to me, I thought, unless there were some way to regain access to the Throne and prostrate myself before his Divine Mercy. They hung inert from my back. Obviously this was part of the penance; my lot was to accept it. The dead weight of the wings would take on the role of cross for the remainder of my predicament here.

Once I stood up I heard noises outside of the structure. Rustling; the approach of something. I held ground. It was not a man; we can smell them coming. This was different. A moment later a decrepit door hanging askew from one hinge close by was nudged open a few inches, and a long snout pushed through, followed by a pair of great dark eyes. It was a large doe. I reached out and slowly pulled the door all the way open and beckoned the animal forward. When she came to me I rubbed under her chin and neck with my hands and leaned towards her. She moved closer and I spoke softly into her ear. The doe lay down beside me and I used her body to shield my own until dawn. There was no possibility of me freezing, but a living body can always draw warmth and comfort from another.


Good morning, I’m Karen Reynolds and this is IHS Cable News. If you’re just joining us, we’re following a developing story via our affiliate, WFSH, which has been unfolding over the last couple of hours in the quiet rural village of Goshen, Massachusetts. That’s in the western portion of the state, a densely wooded region, populated by farming communities and nature preserves, among other things. It’s a strange situation, keep in mind, and we’ll be bringing you additional details as they are revealed to us.

Here’s what we can tell you so far. What you’re looking at there now is a live image captured by our NewsChopper of a place called Light of Truth Evangelical Congregation, which, it appears to be a small church, and as you can see it is surrounded by a bevy of police vehicles, and now it looks like a couple of military vehicles perhaps from a nearby National Guard unit.
Apparently there is an unidentified man who has closed himself inside that church with a group of nursery school children …. three- and four-year-olds … without anyone else. Somehow he seems to have displaced or gotten rid of the teacher that was with the children at the time he came in. It’s unclear exactly what happened but we do know that the teacher herself is evidently unharmed and at this moment is with the authorities outside the church. Now how she got there, and why she would be out there when all the little children in her charge are inside the building with this, with this man, is not known to us but it’s probably something a lot of people are wondering. Obviously it’s tough to tell from these overhead images exactly what is taking place on the ground. But we do know that there is an unidentified man in that building with, we’ve just confirmed, a nursery school class of nine small children.

Not a lot of activity right now as you can see, just that the authorities have the structure completely surrounded, we don’t know if any attempt has been made yet to communicate with the man. We’re getting one report from the dispatcher that the FBI has been contacted and that a hostage negotiator is en route, but that is unconfirmed. And as you can see there are other vehicles pulling up, I can pick out a few minivans down there, one would have to assume there are some very agitated parents.

At this moment, ladies and gentlemen, all we can tell you about the individual in that building is that he is male, and that he appears to be unarmed, yes, that’s unarmed. So that might make you wonder exactly what is the reason for this very cautious, even tense, stand-off. Well folks, that’s where this story gets hazy – there are wildly conflicting reports about who this man might be – to our knowledge only a handful of people so far have actually seen the man, but according to our reporter on the ground, from the affiliate, whom we’ll hear from shortly, and who apparently spoke recently to one eyewitness, the man is very large, unusually large, and possibly an albino!? We’re hearing that he is white, or very fair-skinned. A witness also said that the man may have some other kind of physical deformity, like a curved spine or a hunchback ….

We know how strange this sounds, but as we’ve been promising all morning, we will bring you fresh information just as soon as we get it ourselves on this harrowing story. We’ll take a quick pause. Keep it here.


The day began to break. I sent the doe forth with my blessing and she gave me hers. I had the strong impression that I would need one from somewhere. She needed food and I needed to move, although to where was unclear. At least to orient myself. As the light grew I took gradual stock of my surroundings.

I was in a run-down wooden shack of some kind, clearly no longer in use, but where some type of specialized craft had been practiced in earlier times. There were two large, squat metal vats, presumably empty, taking up one side of the small structure. Each had thick metal pipes leading from the top and through the roof to exhale some vapor or byproduct of whatever industrialized process had taken place in here.

Normally I am sensitive to things being shot forth into the sky by human beings with little concern for their effects. But this place did not give me a feeling of wastefulness. Here was a trade that had been formerly plied by people who cared about what they were doing and took it as a matter of pride to do it correctly. You could tell by standing in the shack that what had been done in here was once of value to others. Now it all lay in shambles, another example of one of the more noble practices of the human species having been laid to rest and probably replaced by a far less honorable procedure.

The rest of the space was filled with dirt; a few leaves; a scattered carpet of pine needles; a stack of old metal buckets; a workbench with some saws and a few steel spikes on it; a pair of stained work gloves; a series of spigots, of various sizes, intended to regulate the flow of liquid. I took a moment and breathed in slowly through my nostrils, inhaling, probing for information. We have many human features, but a far greater sensual capacity. One needs to draw from bottomless wells of feeling to do our job properly; heightened sensitivity helps to collect what is needed for these reserves. I smelled earth, dust, water, manufactured lubricants, and there, underneath it all, a rich smell, a kind of lifeblood: tree sap. They made syrup in here once upon a time.

I smiled; then heard the sound of a motor being ignited not far away, and the next moment a set of tires was crunching through gravel. I moved to the cracked doorway and peered out. A box-like automobile, fairly large, was slowly making its way down a curved driveway, almost a street of its own, towards the shack. The car, red, rumbled past. A burly, bearded man sat behind the wheel, wearing a baseball cap, chugging from a vessel filled with coffee, most likely, obliviously rolling by the shack with no inkling of my presence.

After the car passed I leaned out just far enough to look up the gravel path it had come down, which climbed an upgrade further into the woods to a large, white, two-story house. It looked fairly new, with three dormers across the front, a large porch with a swing on it and an assortment of brightly colored toys. Even from where I stood I could see various forms hustling around inside the house. I couldn’t see any other houses nearby because of the thick trees. At least these people had managed to avoid one of those overcrowded suburban enclaves that this country – for it was obvious now into which I’d fallen, and wouldn’t you know it – was belittled for in other places.

I tucked my head back into the shack. What would I do? The truth was, it hardly mattered. My only outlet now was to observe. If I was lucky, if the Lord was willing to be merciful, He might ask me to perform some kind of intercession. But it could be years before this opportunity ever came. Millennia.

For the moment, I had to plan my movements, unless I just wanted to sit in the shack until someone came and discovered me there. But I could not just step out and casually stroll up the driveway to the house. I’d surely be seen and the usual human hysteria would ensue.
I looked out the doorway again and saw this time that there were two other vehicles sitting at the top of the gravel path. One was a green, partially rusted contraption that had space to sit towards the front and an open, flat bed on the back half used to transport things, one would assume. It said FORD on the back door of the bed and it looked as though it had been around for a while. The other vehicle was large, also box-like, dark blue, and seemed to be in better condition. It was obvious that you didn’t use this vehicle to transport materials; rather, you used it to carry other people.

I decided to wait a bit longer. I had a feeling. The air was freezing cold but the atmospheric conditions didn’t bother me. I’ve been in all of them before. You want it to be cold before you want it to be hot. After some more time had gone by, which didn’t seem like very much but may have been by the local standard, I heard children hooting and hollering, tiny feet on small stones, a self-assured female voice directing the action, another motor starting, tires on gravel once again. The dark blue vehicle rolled past, on to the road, and away.
This was the time to move.


… you’re looking at live images of an apparent hostage situation. The small white building there is called the Light of Truth Evangelical Congregation, a fundamentalist Christian church, where an unknown, unidentified man has been holed up with a group of nine nursery school-aged children for the last hour or so.

We’re told that the authorities don’t know who the suspect is or where he came from. This is where the story gets a little outlandish, ladies and gentlemen. We’re doing our best to gather as much accurate information as possible with regard to the suspect, but the information we have so far seems unreliable. We’re waiting on video of an interview our affiliate’s reporter conducted with a local resident, an eyewitness to some of this man’s activities before he single-handedly apprehended the church … do we have that video yet? … okay ….

Folks, we’re still waiting for it, we’ll have it for you shortly.

From the information we have so far, witnesses report that the suspect is an unusually large white male, unarmed by all accounts. He is evidently extremely tall, some are saying over six feet, some are saying seven feet or more. Also some witnesses have said he is fair skinned, but others are saying he is not just white as in Caucasian, but white, like an albino. We’ve also heard reports that he has some kind of physical deformity, but we don’t yet know exactly what that means. One witness has said he has a pronounced hunchback.

There you can see on the scene there appears to be some sort of hostage negotiator, a man in civilian dress with a bullhorn, who looks as though he is trying to establish communication with the suspect. There are no indications that the suspect has made any attempt to reciprocate.

What? …. okay …. we have that video now, taken about thirty minutes ago by our affiliate, WFSH. This is an interview with an eyewitness who alleges that the suspect actually invaded his home earlier today. Keep in mind, we just received this video, it has not been edited or reviewed by us in any capacity. This is the first time I am seeing it. The witness, I’m told, is 81-year-old Silas Gray, a Goshen resident. Take a look.

—Mr. Gray, you say you actually saw the suspect earlier this morning?

—Yes, ma’am. He was in my house. He stole my pickup truck.

—Can you describe the man for us?

—This wasn’t a man, dear. He was huge, and he had wings. That’s not a man.

—Excuse me. Did you say he had wings?

—Yes ma’am, I did. A massive pair of white wings. He was about—

—Mr. Gray, how old did you say you were?

—Eighty-one. Does that help you picture what this fellow looked like?

—No … it’s just …..

—Because I’m telling you what I saw.

—Go ahead, sir.

—He was at least six and a half feet tall. He had white skin, alabaster skin. He had no hair. He had wings. He didn’t say a word. I think I tried to speak to him. He subdued me, took my rifle away, tied me up. Then he stole my pickup truck and left.

—You had a rifle on him?

—It was a shotgun actually. I heard someone break into the house. So I got my shotgun and went to investigate.

—Did you try to get off a shot?

—No ma’am, not once I had seen him. I thought he was there on different business.

—What does that mean?

—I thought he was there for me.

—I see. Mr. Gray, do you … are you in good health?

—Listen to me, miss. I’ve been healthy and strong all my life. I’ve lived here in Goshen the entire time. I know what it sounds like. You can ask my daughter, son-in-law, or anyone around here if I’m okay in the head, all right? You asked me what I saw, I’m telling you. I’m a Christian believer. That wasn’t a man. The thing that stole my truck is not one of us.


My thought was that I could find a way to help someone, in some small way, being trapped here. Not in any salvific endeavor, of course, but perhaps in the areas of hope or of faith or simply in easing the general burden of living here. This did not seem unreasonable, and was unlikely to incur a wrathful response, or at least no sentence that would be worse than the one already carried out. We are given certain capabilities, gifts one might call them; it feels like a form of sin not to put them into use.

From the shack I scurried forward, doubled over, up the curved path. I kept my ruined wings folded closely at my flanks. Their tips brushed the small sharp stones. It seemed that the trees would shield me from observation by passing vehicles or neighbors. I was counting on the idea that no one else remained in the house. I’d seen the man leave first, then his wife and children. The third vehicle was still nearby, but it didn’t seem to get much use. It sat rusting almost visibly in the early morning cold. But let’s hope it runs, I thought.

I wasn’t sure if I could fold myself into that cramped space. The designers hadn’t had me in mind. But I had to get away from where I was, under concealment. Flight was out of the question. The idea was to isolate myself in some removed place to regroup. An alien cannot extemporize their way around the country they’ve landed in; everyone there is inherently against them. So one has to think things through.

When I got to the house I hopped the porch rail and sided to the door near the end of the path. It seemed to open into the back of the structure. I wrapped my hand around the chilled metal knob and twisted once. The lock inside the wood fell apart and the door jerked open. A wave of stale warmth blew over me and I became temporarily woozy. My senses were assaulted by a battalion of odors. Food; dust; refuse; ash from a cold grate; an animal, possibly more. I steadied myself, then went in.

We’ve had ample time to observe how these creatures live, so I knew what was needed. God was with me, even though I wasn’t with Him. I located the keys quickly. I thought it would be a longer search, but a ring of them hung suspended from pegs on the wall. I plucked them off. They chimed against one another, which sounded in its own way like a tiny chorus. But which was the correct one? I needed the one that was marked with the inscription ford.

It was then that I heard a pair of human feet shuffling nearby on the wood floor. As though lifting them was an effort. The sun was attempting to force its way into the house through the doorway where I stood, like an accomplice. I turned slowly, rising to my full height, blocking off the flood of light. A wrinkled human came into view. A man, wearing striped clothing and pointing a gun.

The man had white hair standing straight up on end, and small white whiskers on his sunken cheeks. He stood about a foot and a half shorter than I. His whole form was swallowed by my shadow. He lifted his eyes towards my silhouetted face, then lowered the barrel.

Bless the nations, the man said.

I sprung on him. I didn’t want to frighten him but it was too late. He lost consciousness and crumpled in my arms. In the room on my right there was a table and chairs where they obviously broke bread. I pressed his frail form into a chair and looked around some more. There was a second row of wooden pegs in a small chamber nearby with laundry machines. I found several long scarves, various colors and lengths, and used them to secure the old man to the chair. The fabric was soft enough not to cut him, but given his weakened state and the number of scarves I used, he might have been stuck there for some time. His forgiveness would have helped, but there was no opportunity to ask for it.

Before I left, the man stirred. I turned back and lowered my face in front of his, offering him my full-on gaze. The man’s eyes fluttered but he did not wake. My own eyes are awash in jade and azure tones. They resemble this planet when seen from a great height. For a moment I thought the man might open his eyes and look into them, but when I saw that he would not I gradually unfurled both wings, powerless though they were, curved them around the back of the chair, and enclosed his entire body. I held him in that space for a moment, touched my forehead briefly to his, and felt his body quiver.

Moments later I was squeezing myself into the vehicle, wings agonizingly crushed into the small space, my back curved unnaturally, head lowered so as to see out the window. I inserted the key and turned it.


… there was initially a single schoolteacher with the children, of course, conducting normal pre-school activities. We have confirmed that the teacher is 27-year-old Amanda Byers, who is from Northampton and lives in Goshen now. Ms. Byers was with the children but for whatever reason either chose to leave the building or was in some way coerced ... either way we know that she exited the church early in the standoff and was later taken in by the authorities. We have a reporter there trying to find out exactly what happened with Ms. Byers.

Now, meanwhile, we are starting to put together some of the pieces about how the man got to the church and where he at least began the day … you saw earlier our affiliate reporter Janet Batchelder’s interview with 81-year-old Silas Gray, who was accosted by the suspect, and whose vehicle was stolen. If you saw that interview you know that Mr. Gray made some unusual observations about the man that did this to him. Janet Batchelder has made her way to the scene, and joins us now.

—Janet, I understand that you have also spoken to Mr. Gray’s daughter, is that correct?

—I did speak to Mr. Gray’s daughter, Christina, moments ago, she did not want to appear on camera. But I want to show our viewers, if Bob can capture this behind me, I’m standing at the bottom of the driveway of the O’Leary residence, that’s Christina O’Leary and her family, this is their home. Mr. Gray is Ms. O’Leary’s father and resides here with them. But as you can see the house itself is farther up the hill. Here behind me is what was once known as a ‘sugar shack’, a separate building where Mr. Gray, a lifelong maple syrup manufacturer, used to produce his own maple syrup to sell locally. As you can see, Karen, the building is abandoned, but I would direct viewers to the roof of the structure … Bob, if you can zoom in on it … you see a substantial hole has been punched through. Now, according to Ms. O’Leary, that hole never existed before last night. You can see very clearly that either a portion of the roof collapsed or that somehow a breach was made in the structure ... we’re bringing this up because Ms. O’Leary said she was out of the house for several hours this morning and when she returned home about 45 minutes ago, she noticed the breach. Then she found her father, bound to a dining room chair inside the house. Now of course, Karen, there could be many explanations for the roof of the shack, but when you combine it with Mr. Gray’s somewhat bizarre observations about the man that stole his vehicle this morning … well, we have the beginnings of a strange story here.

—Yeah, I’ll say, Janet.

—Furthermore, according to Ms. O’Leary, it looks as though someone or something spent time inside the sugar shack during the night. She said she’s never seen that before in her lifetime, that it’s always been abandoned, but she told us that after unbinding and speaking with her father, she came down here to look inside. And that she saw evidence that someone had been in here.

—A very unusual scenario, Janet.

—Indeed.

—What was Ms. O’Leary’s characterization of her father’s state of mind? Did she have anything to say about what he told you earlier?

—We asked her that, Karen, she did not want to comment specifically on whether or not she believed her father’s account. But she did say to us pointedly that she believed he is, and I quote, ‘the sanest, most grounded person I have ever known.’ Back to you.


I guided the vehicle around some curves and over a few inclines until I reached what looked to be the middle of their small town. The cold white sun was harsh and clear, and I knew I was tempting something just by being there. I made an effort to keep the vehicle in constant motion, past the swiveling head of the occasional resident, walking a dog or pedaling a bicycle. I wanted no one to be able to get a on fix me, but inevitably someone probably did.

My only desire was to be of service, to locate someone or something that would be receptive. It collides with our nature to remain silent and inert. He knows this, of course, and figures it into the punishment. My plans, however, were not too grandiose, I thought, and there is a breadth to His Mercy that is often underestimated. In other words, at the time, I felt that there was a kind of safety net below me, as they say here. One might say I was counting on that. Whether this was wise or not, it allowed me to proceed as boldly as I had been.

I did not know my destination just then. I figured I would know it when I got close.

A short time later I arrived at a crossroads in the middle of the village, but it was such a sleepy town that no one was around. I sat in the vehicle for a moment with the machine chugging inside of it like some artificial heart, slapped together by amateurs. Then I heard other sounds, lilting on a fine webstring of air through the glass. Something flickered within me. I turned a crank to lower the window and listened closer. And there it was, a voice. Then several voices. A chorus!
Across the way from where I idled in the vehicle there was a white church. It was not new, because it had been built in such a way as to be recognizable. I know about the churches now that resemble massive hangars of human commerce, soul shopping malls. This was not one of those places.

Slowly I moved the vehicle forward into the parking lot. I followed it around the back of the building, a traditionally-shaped structure with a spire, painted white but with large scales peeling off, clearly in need of basic repairs. There was a large sign out in front of the double doors that had the name of the congregation – Light of Truth – and below this an open space where one could arrange plastic letters to deliver a message. It read:

ITS S NDAY
WHATS MISSING?
U!

Evidently this was intended to jolt readers into changing whatever plans they might have had for the Sabbath and attending services instead. How successful this campaign was seemed open to question.

Behind the church in the small parking lot strewn with blackened patches of unmelted snow there were a few other vehicles and a back door. I assumed that this led into a basement or to some all-purpose rooms that were used for church functions other than the ceremonial. With my window still partially rolled down I glided up near to this door, cocked my head and listened.

I could still hear them, the voices. They were beautiful, all of them, scrambling up over a rather tentative, plinking piano rendering a reasonable approximation of ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children’. Their untainted sentiments lilted up into the air and out of this place, seeking the ear of the Lord of Hosts, who has said, Let the little children come to me.

Here was my charge. They needed me. My heart gorging, I abandoned the vehicle and went inside.


… the stand-off, ladies and gentlemen, is now upwards of two hours hold and continuing on. At this stage most of the parents or family members associated with the children are gathered outside of the building, they are the civilians you see huddled together there on the lawn behind the barricades of police vehicles and military HUMVEEs.

Now, here are some of the other facts that we know or think we know as of this moment. We know that the man in the church is operating alone. We know that he arrived there in a pickup truck that he stole earlier this morning from a Goshen resident named Silas Gray. That vehicle has since been re-acquired by police and returned to Mr. Gray undamaged. We believe that the man in the church is unarmed; this according to the schoolteacher, Amanda Byers, who was with the children when the man arrived but was compelled into leaving the church entirely.

All morning we have been trying to get some answers to the most obvious questions raised by this situation, such as Why did Ms. Byers agree to leave the children were alone with this man, and Why have the authorities not attempted to enter the church if they believe the man is unarmed, et cetera. Folks, I can tell you that there are a lot of reports and rumors and stories floating around … but we now … are we ready? Great. We now hope to get some legitimate information because agreeing generously to speak to us for a moment in the middle of this crisis is the Deputy Sherriff of Hampshire County, William Cosgrave.

—Deputy Cosgrave, Karen Reynolds of IHS Cable News. Can you hear me all right, sir?

—Yes ma’am, I can.

—Thank you very much for speaking with us this morning. I know the situation is tense.

—You’re welcome.

—What can you tell us about what is happening right now?

—Well … basically we have a suspect in the building alone with nine young children who is not cooperating with us at the present time.

—What does that mean, he is not cooperating?

—It means that the suspect is not responding to any of our attempts to make contact with him in order to negotiate or identify his intentions.

—Has he harmed any of the children, Deputy?

—Not that we are aware of. We’re not in there, that’s the thing. But we believe he has not harmed or attempted to harm anyone at the present time.

—Do you know for certain that the man is unarmed?

—We are reasonably sure, ma’am, that the suspect is not armed, according to the statements of Ms. Byers and Mr. Gray from earlier this morning.

—Ms. Byers being the schoolteacher … Deputy, are those the only two eye-witnesses?

—No ma’am, there is another, a gentleman who happened to be walking his dog in the woodline up there behind me, who saw the suspect go in to the church and saw Ms. Byers come out. He’s the one who contacted the police.

—Who is that gentlemen and where is he now?

—He is still talking to us, he’s on the scene, but he asked not to be identified.

—All right. So, Deputy Cosgrave, I think what most people are probably wondering is, if the man is not armed, why has no one attempted to go into the building? Can you explain that to our viewers? What’s the holdup!?

[Pause]

—Well … Karen, I think that the best way to answer that is to say that we’re being extremely cautious because we don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with.

—Could you …. It is possible for you to elaborate on that, Deputy?

—Well, we don’t …. I’m not interested in alarming people any further, okay? Let’s just say we’ve had some conflicting accounts of what the man looks like and who people think he might be.

—Are you referring to Mr. Gray’s statements earlier today that he believes the man inside the church is not a man at all?

—Karen, it’s best if I do not comment on—

—Have you heard any other witnesses say that the suspect has a pair of—

—Ma’am, the front door of the church is opening. We’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you very much.

[To be concluded with Part Two soon]

Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 53

On Writing Short Stories: A Second Meditation

I got to thinking about writing short stories not too long ago on this blog, as a means of keeping my creative juices flowing when the novel I am writing was sputtering, as it is now again. It seems I have run into some kind of trouble keeping things on course in each of the last 3-4 chapters. Somehow I have managed to work out of the jam in each case so far, which is positive, but the delays this way of writing the novel causes are more or less unacceptable if I ever truly want to see this novel through and get it done.

Other writers, like T.C. Boyle, seem to take a run at a story or several in between novels they have written; in my case, it looks like I have some kind of weird propensity to taking a swing at one inbetween chapters of a novel……which is not very good for the novel’s momentum, of course. And it doesn’t ever seem to advance my prospects in the short story market, because as I’ve said here ad nauseam, after almost 15 years of sending out stories I’m still searching for my first publishing success in fiction. (I have two stories I’m still peddling out there now, waiting to hear their fate, one of which has already been rejected three times, the other once so far. But just to show you that I haven’t given up.)

In any event, here I am working on Chapter VII of the novel and I have hit yet another creative snag. I am struggling on one scene in particular, and sometimes when that happens the whole thing grinds to a halt. It’s hard when you hit these creative dryspells. You learn only through long experience, even if you’re not a household name, that the only way through is straight ahead. You have to kind of power your way through like the pointman of an infantry patrol who has to stay on azimuth but finds himself pushing through thick brambles. We’ve all been there, right?

For me that method doesn’t always mean sticking to the particular scene or story I am writing, but it does mean continuing to write, nearly at all costs. Sometimes you have to shelve something for a small period of time and return to it. It really hurts you on the timing front, more delays to completing your masterpiece, but then again, you never know where your tangents can sometimes lead. My last two short stories are among my best writing in my own opinion, and both of them were written while I was logjammed on the novel.

So I am beginning another short story. The tentative title is ‘Angel Accelerating’. I don’t really know how or why it got started. I had this image pop into my head that had to do with an angel that crashed to earth – operative word ‘crashed’, no soft flight, as if he’d been expelled – and stole a car. Why’d he steal a car? I wondered. Doesn’t an angel have wings? What was he doing down there? Where could he go? This story started as an attempt to answer those questions. Although at this early point it feels like it’s oriented towards a weirder vein than mos t of my other short stories so I am not sure if any, or all, of these answers are going to be provided. We’ll see. It may become more about, well, other things.

This is the second story in a row, if you count my previous short story ‘Suicide Station’, that started with a fragmentary image, and a strange/surreal one at that, and grew out of an attempt to determine what the story behind the image was. The only difference is that the prompt for ‘Suicide Station’ came from my subconscious in a dream, literally, whereas the image of the fallen angel jacking someone else’s car – as opposed to singing God’s praises or rolling stones away or delivering messages or what have you – came to me smack in the middle of the day for reasons that are entirely obscure to the writer. Call it living in a fantasy world to a frightening degree; call it a by-product of my crazy reading tastes; call it what you want, but that’s how the ideas seem to be coming these days. In pieces, and at odd times.

By the way this story is also revealing an even more baffling trend towards two-word story titles on the part of yours truly, if you consider one of my more recent stories was 2005’s ‘Start Something’, and my last two were ‘Auto-Response’ (still two words!) and ‘Suicide Station’. Now here comes ‘Angel Accelerating’. What the heck this reveals is minimal to the point of irrelevance, but it’s still kind of weird.

I feel increasingly like I go into writing short stories in particular with almost no real idea of what I am trying to accomplish. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It may represent me learning some lessons about fiction writing which would have stood me well if I had only learned them like 15 years ago instead of now. But no matter. I’m a late bloomer, I always have been, and that still can give me some hope. My brain these days feels better equipped to dig into nebulous material and find the story there, as opposed to beginning with some kind of concept or plot idea and attempting to construct the story around that.

This story I am beginning now seeems to be informed in an off-handed way by a few things. The first was the image popping into my head as I said before. But following that, there have been other prompts to persuade me to give the story a try. For a while I was listening to an audio version of the New Testament in my car, read by actors, the most notable being Jim Caviezel, best known for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. I was listening to the first two gospels, Matthew and Mark, and I kept getting struck by the almost casual mention of angels here and there in the narratives. They would just pop in to Jesus’ words from time to time, or into the narrative itself, but never with much explanation. Like how Jesus, early in the accounts of his adult life, spends 40 days fasting in the desert, the Scriptures say ‘angels came, and administered to him’. What? Who? In what way? Does that mean they brought him food? How many helped him out? But it just kind of breezes past you. Ditto when Jesus is being arrested in Gesthemane, and he tells his disciples, ‘Do you think I could not ask my father right now, and he would send legions of angels? …… but it must be thus, that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.’ He would? How many angels? To do what? Trash the Roman soldiers?? It just got me thinking about the mysterious idea of angels at all. Not human, not God…….

Also I think I am being subconciously influenced by some writers I have read recently. The young but rising writer Chris Adrian’s novels and stories have an abundance of angels in them, and last year I read his collection A Better Angel. In an anthology I just finished I came across a story I had read once before, A.S. Byatt’s ‘The Thing in the Forest’, which is a magnificently written, strange, and sinister tale which recounts a single incident shared by two girls who meet during the evacuation from London during World War II. They are sent to a large country estate, and there they wander, unsupervised, into the woods where they encounter, quite literally, a thing in the forest. The remarkable thing about this story is that even though the entire conceit of meeting a monster in the woods has no basis in reality, the ‘thing’ is described so vividly and the reader experiences it so viscerally that you accept it anyway as the truth of the story. It happened. Reading this the second time around I was not only impressed so much by the writing, but I also realized, again, you can do anything. Just because something can’t happen in real life doesn’t mean it cannot in your story. You just have to find a way to express it in a manner that makes it real. It’s not easy to do, but the idea of attempting to do it is liberating. Finally, I have been reading some of the work of the inimitable Denis Johnson over the last year, and in the same anthology I happened across his remarkable novella called ‘Train Dreams’. This story ends with a kind of wolf-creature howling on a stage in front of a rapt crowd. The notion sounds preposterous. But in the context of this startling and powerul novella it comes across not only as a guttural, harrowing experience, but it seems to reach far beyond that, to signal that an entire era of human history has come to some kind of wounded close, and some new and darker reality is stepping in to plug the gap. Now THAT is powerful stuff. And yet it all comes out of a scene that in my description sounds ludicrous and hokey.

Does this mean my new story will be anything BUT ludicrous and hokey? Probably not….but I know what is possible. And I can dream as hard as I can towards it. Maybe this way I’ll write a good story, maybe someone will want to publish it. Maybe it will simply succeed in breaking the logjam and getting me going on the novel again.

Either way, pressing on with my story is a good move.

See You In The Next Life

In Memoriam, Melissa A. Cino, 1972-2009


Now in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring.
Thomas Merton


I WAS– AND I STILL AM – a fraud.

I don’t mean as a human being. I mean as a Pittsburgh Steeler fan. I’m not from Pittsburgh. Never even set foot there. In fact, I am such a facsimile of a true fan that I wasn’t even aware of the term ‘Stillers’, and did not know what it meant, until I learned of it from the wife of Peter Cino, my good friend for more than 30 years.

Melissa ‘Missy’ Cino, who died of cancer on April 2, was the real thing.

Pete employed the term in December 2004, as his wife and I were making plans to attend a football game between the Steelers and his favorite team, the New York Giants. In an email message he made reference to how Missy and I would enjoy watching the ‘Stillers’ play. I ‘corrected’ him in a reply, saying that no one called them that. He informed me as diplomatically as possible that his wife, having been born and raised in Murrysville, Pennsylvania – 20 miles east of Pittsburgh – had enlightened him long before that this is precisely what true-bred fans did call the team.

Whoops! Point taken.

I choose to begin this inadequate reflection on my 18-year friendship with Missy Cino with this ‘teaching point’ for two reasons. One, it was the lead-in to the second-to-last direct experience I ever had with Missy, a time I will always treasure; and two, it illuminates one of the small but meaningful ways in which Pete Cino showed his great love for his wife. For the fact is that when I came into possession of two tickets to the Giants-Steelers contest that year at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, my first thought was to call my old friend and invite him to come with me. As I have pointed out, Pete loves the Giants, so I was sure he would leap at the opportunity. ‘It will be my first time ever seeing the Steelers play in person,’ I cried gleefully.

Pete thanked me for the thought, and then told me without hesitation that he wouldn’t be going. ‘Why the hell not?’ I asked him. ‘I really want to,’ said Pete, ‘but Missy has never seen the Steelers play in person either, believe it or not. She’s going with you to that game.’

And so it was. Pete even sent me my own ‘Terrible Towel’ to wave. Missy and I did attend the game together, which happened to be the first ever match-up between then-rookie quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning, both of whom ended up being Super Bowl champions later. We watched the ‘Stillers’ go ahead early, then blow a good lead; the game turned into a cold-weather thriller as the winter evening descended on our chilled knuckles and wind-burned cheeks.

I remember Missy and me howling in unison and exchanging the obligatory high-fives as Jerome Bettis rumbled across the goal line for a short-yardage touchdown to secure a road victory for Pittsburgh. Throughout the game, we huddled closely to beat the stinging gusts streaking in from the swamps of Jersey, shared stories about our small children (I had one daughter at the time; she had two young boys), and hurled screams of support (and derision) down onto the frozen turf. It was great fun and I’ll remember it always.

One of my other favorite shared experiences with Missy was not one occasion at all, but stretched out over almost all the time I knew her, almost two decades. It was like one long-running joke. It’s not something that a lot of people would understand, but it sure gave me, my twin brother John, Pete, and a few others friends a lot to laugh about.

In 1988, when Pete, John and I were high school seniors (Missy was two years younger), an action-comedy film called Midnight Run arrived in theaters, with Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin. In the annals of celluloid history, this film was fated to be obscured by another action-comedy that opened around the same time, called Die Hard. But I digress. Midnight Run is about a bounty hunter (de Niro) who was hired to track down a seemingly weak-willed accountant (Grodin) who embezzled money from a mob boss, and transport him from New York to Los Angeles. If he did so successfully and in time, a sleazy bail-bondsman would pay him $100,000. The action-comedy aspects came into play in the form of a dizzying array of obstacles, accidents, misunderstandings, and hang-ups that all conspired to prevent the bounty hunter from completing the job and collecting the money.

The script, written by George Gallo, was filled with hilarious expletive-filled banter between not only de Niro and Grodin’s characters, but also between, behind and beyond just about everybody else who appears on the screen. The Internet Movie Database informs me that what we affectionately call the ‘F-word’ these days is used 119 times in the film.

For reasons no one will ever understand, this film became an obsession among my friends and I, and we would watch it over and over, together and apart, over the next 15 years. It didn’t take long for us to start quoting the script to each other, for it did have numerous very funny lines, and some of them seemed to be applicable to multiple situations, such as: ‘You know, you’re in this mess because you’re in this mess; I didn’t put you in this mess’. Somewhere along the way this developed into an untitled contest – a game – where the ongoing challenge was to determine who could find the most appropriate, or the wittiest, means of inserting a quote from Midnight Run into everyday life.

The game was, and still is, sophomoric. But in the same manner in which old school mates will tell the exact same stories over and over again whenever they reunite – stories that were absurd even the first time they were told – this practice of finding ways to work a quote from the film into a conversation became a part of the ritual whenever our old crew came together. Nobody understood the game except us, which made it funnier. You could only imagine the reaction of our girlfriends first, then our wives, and then even our children, as time ambled on and Pete, John, myself, and others continued to play this game unabated. Eyes rolled; heads shook; probably a lot of thoughts flew around the question of how boys who had ostensibly turned into men could still act exactly like boys.

Most people reacted this way to the game. But not Missy Cino. She not only seemed to accept the game – she embraced it, she joined it. And before very long, she was better at it than any of us. She reached the point where you could be having conversations about totally divergent subject matter, and out of nowhere she could insert a quote from the film that fit so well, we all would stop dead in our tracks, think for a moment about what had just been said, and then burst into laughter. There were times when she did this even during discussions of potentially difficult subjects, and it would always ease the tension.

I don’t know if she ever quoted the film in an attempt to make light of her own strenuous, and final, battle against the disease which claimed her life. But if I were a betting man I’d put a wager on it.

Since her struggle with cancer began, and even more so since her untimely death at the shocking age of 36, I have tried to make sense of why her role in what seems like such a silly ritual – this game around a goofy movie that not many people remember – means something to me. And I can only conclude that it has to do with the way Missy seemed to accept us – meaning Pete’s old buddies from the grammar school years, and Pete himself when he was with us – for exactly who and what we were. She never made fun of us for acting like a bunch of overgrown idiots, which we made a science of. She just rolled with it. She joined right in, and it never seemed unnatural.

There’s always that special woman who can be at the same time so totally female, in the best possible sense, and yet, when the situation calls, can also stand in effortlessly as another one of the ‘guys’. I think what this boils down to is the woman stooping to enter the sub-strata of male rituals of friendship and communication, and joining in with it instead of casting judgment. Missy was this kind of woman.

I remember Missy as being equally adept in talking about the Yankee starting rotation (the Cinos are big Yankee fans), or the latest Rush record, or the Steelers of course, as she would be in discussing motherhood or her community involvement. In my times with Missy over 18 years it was not unusual to have her in a room with five or six other men who all had known each other for decades, telling old and increasingly ridiculous stories. She knew them all and would share in the telling. In her later years she would talk proudly about her sons’ baseball exploits or other boyish triumphs as both a mom and an ardent fan. Missy always struck me as a wonderful mother to sons – down to earth, engaged, with a pair of dirty hands and scuffed-up knees – and her eyes gleamed with her love for them and her pride in their accomplishments. One got the feeling that if Peter or Daniel ever wound up on a team that won the World Series, Missy would be the mother storming the field rather than waiting until afterwards to offer a demure hug.

If I can only speak about Missy through the filter of my essential boyishness, it may be because I did not know her nearly as well as others. I know next to nothing about her childhood, nor do I know about any of her female relationships; tributes to Missy Cino strictly as a woman would have to come from other sources. In other words, I knew a lot less about her than she did about me. One of my painful regrets is that I was never able to observe Missy interacting with her youngest child, her daughter, which was all the more difficult when I finally looked upon this beautiful little girl at her mother’s viewing and saw Missy’s own face there.

Yet the fact that I knew Missy almost as ‘one of the guys’ I think leads directly to my ultimate understanding of her, which is that she loved all of us fellas through her unselfish love for Pete Cino. Because she loved Pete so much, so too did she love us, and she always, always let the boys be boys. In some ways, this woman who was junior to us in years was a kind of mother to us all: she was lovely enough to inspire our pride; generous enough to indulge our immaturity; fun enough to join us in it; decent enough not to criticize it.

Missy had a wonderful, throaty laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made a man long to have a beer in his hand so he could hoist it in the direction the laugh came from. I remember it perfectly, and can hear it even as I write these words. I hope somewhere, somehow I can drag it up from the depth of Missy’s healthy, pain-free gut one last time when I offer this last remembrance:

Missy, your courageous struggle will mark my heart forever, and your death came far too soon. After it came, and all of us men had gathered in one more smack session after saying goodbye to you, I felt later on that I had been set anew on a long, twisting, and possibly arduous road representing the rest of my time on earth without you. And facing that road, I can only think of one thing to say.

Looks like I’m walkin’.[i]


[i] ‘Looks like I’m walkin’’ is the final line from the film Midnight Run. ‘See you in the next life’ is also a line from the film.