Cautionary (Piece of) Tale

29 July 09

“Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money, and ambition,” – Hemingway, when asked what harms a writer. (The Green Hills of Africa).

Much as I love the big fellow, I think Papa missed out on an element here: family. And to think Hemingway was a Tolstoy man, too. Where would the Russian great be without the deep intricacies of family life, feudal to royal? But it isn’t until Hem gets old and a little crazy and sentimental over his slipping life that family members start to appear in his fiction. Until then it’s bullfighters, rum-runners, boxers, hunters, and the cunning women that bring them down. Woman as mother, or loving companion? Only the coddling meddling kind, who pamper a boy or man, and thereby hamper his need to get on the trail or the rails and see life. For some reason Hem despised his suburban Chicago upper-middle class upbringing, sensed cowardice in the conventions of it, despite the good vacations into the lake region his father’s income as a doctor afforded them. Family held you back. Much as it gave to you, in comfort and companionship and love and the lessons of life, those things only weighed you down or backbit you in the end. While that may sometimes be true, what possibilities for material! Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver come to mind right off. Wharton and Austen, of course. But then they’re women, right?

And talk about family stories. . . It was last month when my co-worker El started telling me about the affair he’s been having with his dentist’s assistant. We were up on the scaffolding, just the two of us, rolling out tar-paper and stapling the courses to the sheathed building. The fog had burned off and the trees and gardens of the backyards below sparkled in the sun.

"Nice, huh?” he said, lifting his phone to show me a picture on the screen. “Is my girlfriend."

“Girlfriend? Real nice. What about your wife?”

“She don’ care.”

“Doesn’t care? Or doesn’t know?”

El grinned deviously, his gap tooth showing, the tooth that got him into all of this. He’s a handsome, warm-eyed Guatemalan who goofs around on the job a lot, but he’s a good guy, and I guess that’s why the boss keeps him around. He’s got a rogue’s charm.

“It don’ matter, man,” he explained. “My wife, she like my sister.”

“So your sister doesn’t care if you run around on her?”

“She don’ know — so she don’ care,” he laughed. He then emphasized that the secret is just between us, and I’m not to tell any of his family on the job. Apparently they don’t care either, so long as they don’t know. As we worked he gave me the back-story, how he’d gone to have his teeth fixed and started flirting with the dentist’s assistant. He picked her up when she got off work and the affair took flame from there.

“You’re a fast worker, El.”

“She’s hot, man. You work fast too, you see her.”

Later in the day, when nobody was around, he showed me more photos, these involving the dentist’s office, which had become their meeting place at night.

“But her husband,” he grinned daringly, “he’s a real big fucker. A Tongan.”

“Man, I’d get out of it.”

“Why?”

“I’m telling you. It’s gonna end bad. You should get out while you can.”

“I don’ care.”

“You’ll care when your face is caved in and all that dentist work’s gone to waste.”

“I don’ care,” he flashed his rogue smile. “Is life, man. It go up and down.”

And the story would indeed go up and down for weeks, diving to some pretty ugly lows. Turns out his wife got a hold of his cell phone, and the pictures therein. She didn’t take it like any kind of sister I know. The following night she followed El to the dentist’s office and snuck in after the two. Caught them getting creative in one of the chairs and tore the hell out of the place, breaking equipment and ripping pictures off the walls. El didn’t show up for work the next day. When he did he told me the whole deal. Somehow his brother and old man on the job still didn’t know what was going on, so I wasn’t to spill anything. You’d think the blowup would’ve put an end to the affair. But no. Love, especially the mistaken and infatuated and blood-roiling kind, doesn’t slip away so easily. And nearly each day I receive another saucy update on El’s rollercoaster ride.

So there might be a story there. Certainly there is, but is it a story for me to write about? Is it mine, as a writer, free to take what I find or am told or can imagine, and carve a piece of fiction from it? Anna doesn’t like the idea. When I told her about the affair she thought the whole thing rotten, and hazarded me against exploiting it. What insights could I draw from it? she wanted to know. It’s a fair question. But I’m not so concerned with that, as long as the story is a good one. If there’s a drop of humor in a story, then that’s often all the insight I need. Humor redeems our ugly side. What makes me laugh is, at times, worth examining in itself, even if that means looking darkly into a gash caused by a toilet falling out of the sky.

The nonsense of our lives, funny or peculiar, in some cases maddening or alienating, is what the likes of Sartre and Camus were compelled to examine. What are these bits of life drifting about us, the detritus of our everyday, the anecdotes heard on the street or the job site? And what kind of meaning can be made of them? And if we must construct that meaning, doesn’t it follow that those bits are intrinsically meaningless? What is to be learned, in Sartre’s short story The Wall, from Pablo having lied to his jailers about the location of a fellow soldier, only to be accidentally and absurdly correct about the graveyard hideaway of his comrade, thus dooming him to execution?

(So Anna and I have our differences, on this point, and in our tastes for literature. For instance, I like noir lit quite a lot, Existentialism’s hardboiled American cousin. Anna finds the stuff short on depth and meaning – too stereotyped and cartoony. I concede that’s sometimes the case. Speaking of Hemingway, To Have and Have Not and Men without Women, his most noir works, are arguably his poorest for just those reasons. But still I like them. The Thirties were a rough time in the States and Hem’s stories carry the grit and slang and desperation of the period like bootlegged time capsules. Still again, it’s a woman, Martha Gellhorn, who does a better, a more personal and emotional job, of capturing the human suffering of the Depression in The Trouble I’ve Seen.)

But I’m straying. What’s to be made of a tale like El’s? Maybe it’s nothing more than just another pulp nonfiction overheard in our everyday, a curio to look over before leaving it well alone. Anna wanted to know if I wasn’t just exploiting the story for its scandalous qualities. To a degree, I am. At least as the example that got this entry going: proof of how rich a source of material family life can be. Maybe the moral of the tale is how much safer those stories are, if you’re lucky to be told them, when they come from other people’s families.

As for El, the last I’d heard he was separated from his wife, missing his kids, and trying very hard to cut himself off from the dentist’s assistant, who won’t stop calling him.

Little Traveller

18 July 09

Sometimes Ada moans frightfully in her sleep, or catches her breath like she’s wrestling with a nightmare, then wakes with a startling cry. It's a bit haunting, actually. We try to wake and calm her before things go too far. It makes us wonder what a baby could possibly have to dream about, and why nightmares? What could they dream of, except those things they carry into this life: the knapsack of their subconscious full of the relics of past lives.

Late last night Ada cried convulsively, as though from some deeply pained place, all the hurt of humanity twisting up from it — the poor girl red-faced and arms snapping. Anna and I took turns with her, both too tired to curse. Where does the convulsion come from? Or is it nothing more than a bb of gas passing through? That tiny pain a holocaust to her? Or some ancient memory of a holocaust?

Then a calm night's sleep, and in the morning she's curled against Anna softly as a rabbit, awake as her mother sleeps, cooing to herself, big eyes looking about the room contentedly, studying the old painting of poppy flowers above the bed, a smile hooking up one side of her mouth, our room a world of beautiful fantasy to her. I don’t know what tires you more as a parent, the lack of sleep or the course of emotions you’re run through.

Anna’s mother Claudia is here for the week. After busy days of helping us with chores about the house, we called it quits and made a trip to Montara Beach. Ada’s first visit to the ocean! The wind was blowing so we set up my one-man tent as a refuge and made a picnic lunch. Afterwards I carried Ada – to mild protests from mother and grandmother – down to the water's edge. She strained to look about at everything, the sandy pock-marked cliffs and the pale cloud-shredded sky, the tan beach arching away before the crashing waves tumbling in like falling mountains. I went in shin-deep, reached down and brought up a palm of water, which I lightly poured over Ada's head. Her face soured and she began to cry as I put my pinky into her mouth so she could taste the water running down her cheeks. Then I said a little prayer aloud to her and the thrashing sea, asking for it's blessing, that the waters of the world be with her and grant her their steady strength. I'm not a religious man, and if I was I'd fall closer to animist than any other. But I'm just superstitious enough to want to cover my bets and keep the sea on our side. Call it a pagan baptism. Soon Ada quit crying and began looking about again, her blonde lashes sparkling as she blinked against the sharp light. I gave her a kiss, told her she was a good girl, a good tough water girl now, with all the world and its waterways of travel before her, and brought her back to momma.

The Work that Shapes Us

13 July 2009

Work. The dream/invention/invented dream of modern man is to escape from work. Work transformed into something cruel and unnatural and shackling by the Industrial Age and its smoke stacks and assembly lines and fourteen-hour work days. A mechanical degree of separation between one’s life and one’s self-sustenance. And so what was once natural and dignifying becomes toilsome and deforming, becomes work. A wall to be climbed or crushed against, daily. Yet it’s not only the worker who dreams of freedom from toil, but the artist. To be free not merely of work, but of the mundane. Free to make something more of life than survival — in short, free to make something beautiful.

I sometimes wonder if the guys on the job feel the same everyday burden of work as I do. It’s interesting that the stereotype of Mexicans was once of the loafer, sombrero pulled down over his eyes as he dozed in the afternoon sun, because nowadays the stereotype has swung to the other extreme, of tireless worker, day laborer or migrant farmer or landscaper in the August heat, willing to toil for longer hours and cheaper pay than his Anglo counterpart.

The Latinos I work with rarely complain about the task at hand, even on Monday mornings, which for me is usually the grimmest sharpest point of the workweek sword. I find myself wondering if they aren’t more genuine workers than I am. Or if they aren’t “workers” to their core being, who don’t mind at all doing what is merely in their nature. But I know that’s bullshit, an enlargement of the new stereotype. It’s something the upper classes have been telling themselves for generations: the lower classes love and live to work.

The reality is, outside of disparities of pay and conditions, that work is work for all workers. Work is hard, usually dirty, sometimes painful and dangerous, and unless the job is of your own enterprise, only occasionally rewarding.

The other day I was doing a job with S., sistering up 2x6’s to the existing rafters in the roof. It was a difficult task, but we got after it, and the feel of the hefty lumber in our hands and the strength in our shoulders as we climbed the ladders carrying the boards and wrangling them into position, flat alongside the old rafters, straining to hold them there until the jack, extended by a post, was cranked up to drive them the extra inches, the new 2x6 and the old stiff rafter creaking upwards to the string line we’d pulled taught to establish a new level line, and the pop pop pop of the nail gun riveting the boards together, making them one, until all of those motions were a rhythm that made us forget our toil and the passing hours. That’s not entirely true. We didn’t forget the toil, as much as the rhythm of work became an exercise that felt good to our moving bodies. The toil became a half-pleasant task. And the day became a good one because we began to enjoy the job.

But the morning had not started out that way. The morning, for me, had started out with a gloomy Monday resentfulness over being forced back to work. I could tell S. was in a low mood too, though I didn’t know if it was for the same reason. I said something derogatory about the “pinche rafters” we had to hoist.

S. laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Everyday trabajo,” he said.

“Everyday. You don’t get tired of it?”

“Si,” he smiled pitifully. “But every month, the bills are coming, no?”

That seemed to sum it up, both matter-of-factly, and philosophically. The bills are waiting and so is the work to be done. What escape is there from the cycle? And why must the cycle exist at all, or be so cruel to our human natures? If we don’t like such a life, why have we created it for ourselves?

I have a love/hate relationship with work. It’s been the coal in the furnace of my engine, feeding a long train’s drive towards that ineffable something — art, writing, beauty — which in turn has been an escape, or a diversion, from the demands of economics. The blue collar in me both believes in and loathes work. The good kind — using your hands, shaping materials that in turn shape you, getting a little dirt under your nails and sweat on your brow — is healthy for you. The good kind restores something primal and necessary and animal in us.

My first jobs, started at the age of twelve, were lawn-mowing, baby-sitting, sweeping up construction sites after school, and I paid my first income taxes when I was fifteen and working as a dishwasher for a restaurant in downtown Boise. Since then I’ve done everything from bartending to carpentry, wildland firefighting to river guiding, landscaping to bailing hay. The work has been good for me, and probably there’s a healthy heap in store for me still. But it’s one thing to be working to pay your own way, sticking through a season or two in order to save up pay so that you can cut loose for a stretch and travel and loaf and have time to write or do your thing. Work then is a very practical and direct means to not having to work, to economic liberty.

But when you’re a father and your family depends on you to pay the rent and car insurance and groceries for the week, the sudden $1000 hospital bill, then work is no longer something you can just take or leave, but something that has you by the balls. Then you don’t see the sunny end of the work season, where you’ll be sitting in cafes in Milano, or skiing the peaks above Lake Tahoe, free for a long while to roam and write and flirt with life. No, you don’t see that now. You see one long ongoing epoch of indebtedness and indenturement. How can a workingman make enough money to pay for his family’s well being, when his own includes a fundamental need for time off? For art and life, writing and family, leisure and travel? We all need that, not just the writers and artists of the world. It’s part of our human nature to loaf and observe and fiddle about in the world around us.

I think of how good pre-agricultural peoples had it, and especially the natives of North America, with this vast and beautiful landscape around them. It’s estimated that most hunter-gather societies spent an average of two or three hours a day on subsistence. Three hours of subsistence a day? Leaves a lot of time for pot making and basket weaving and story telling and stick sharpening, doesn’t it? It’s too simple and reductionist to glorify those faraway days. But then, I’m not so complicated after all. All I need is to get satisfaction from what I must do, and to have plenty of time for the things I want to do. Plenty of time for family and art. And having those things, when the time comes to lift new rafters into the roof, I’ll be more than happy to put my shoulders into the job.