The Train

I remember one locomotive, in black and white, smashing into another.

At five or six or seven years old--not something you forget. Or at eight or nine or ten. The moving image of those two trains colliding, the accelerated chuffings of one locomotive bearing down on another splayed across the tracks, the collision inevitable and yet impossible: they're not really going to crash into each other, those two trains. And they do.

The first time I saw John Frankenheimer's "The Train" I must have been around six years old. The screen I saw it on was that of a wooden, boxy Magnavox in the living room. Back then you saw movies in one of two places, in the theater when first released, or on television when and if one of the three or four networks broadcast them. If memory serves me, I saw it on Channel 9, WPIX, on The Million Dollar Movie (please don't check facts).

The title alone would have drawn me. What boy of six (or seven or eight...) isn't drawn to trains? By then I already had a Lionel train, the one my parents got me for Christmas, set up in the play room downstairs: one locomotive and a circle of track set up on a table made from a large sheet of thick plywood laid across two saw horses. No houses, trees, buildings, nothing but the bare tracks and a transformer than hummed, grew warm, and gave off a dull, metallic odor when in use. It was enough. Down there, with my Lionel set, I could do with my train what I liked. I could make it go backwards. I could make it jump the tracks (alll too easy to do); I could put things on the track for my train to crash into: a wooden box, a shoe, a Matchbox car.

The movie, starring Burt Lancaster, has a simple but stirring plot: at the close of World War II, an obsessed Nazi general, played to perfection by Paul Schofield, contrives to deliver a trainload of so-called "degenerate art"--contemporary masterpieces by Braque, Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, ransacked from the Jeu de Paume--into Germany before the allies close in. To achieve his goal Colonel von Waldheim commandeers a train and the services of LaBiche (Burt Lancaster), an engineer and railroad man who happens also to be a member of the French resistance with his own orders: to see to it that the train never arrives in Germany while also protecting it from allied bombers.

Adding great dimension to this simple premise is von Waldheim's passion for the paintings he has plundered. However "degenerate," he realizes its value not only in Reichmarks, but as art. He is in love with the paintings--so much so that he is willing to sacrifice many lives, including his own, to "own" them however vicariously and briefly. This equation pitting the value of art against that of humanity runs as deeply and thoroughly through the film as the chuffing refrain of locomotive engines and the deep depth-of-field black and white photography that gives each frame of the movie the quality of a Cartier-Bresson photograph.

"The Train" may be the first noir-action-war picture, one whose starkness is complemented by a plot of nearly pure action (man must stop train) such that the very minimal dialogue--much of it dubbed over the voices of French actors--is scarcely necessary. One things of Keaton's "The General," with its similar plot and theme. "The Train" is the direct descendant of that 1927 silent comedy classic, harbinger of countless "chase scenes" and "action movies" to follow.

But when it was made in 1964, "The Train" did something that practically all action films made since have failed to do: it took its time. Instead of a lot of jump-shots and quick-cuts, we watch sensible action sequences played out in real-time. When Burt Lancaster rigs an explosion, we watch him prepare the detonation fuse, stripping the wires, twirling them into each other, and sinking them into the plastique, covering the fuse and explosive with ballast, then unspooling the wore to where he attaches it to the plunger contacts. The sequence takes several minutes. The whole movie is filled with such painstaking processes. Blowing things up takes time (from today's films you wouldn't think so). There are no special effects. A rail yard is blown to bits--for real (in fact it was due to be demolished; Frankenheimer and his crew obliged.) A single short sequence where the train is strafed by a fighter plane cost as much to film in itself as the rest of the movie.

Through"The Train" I got my first dose of culture. Art was no longer an abstraction. Something of great value was packed inside those crates. All those locomotives chuffing and crashing, they served a greater purpose. Spoiler alert: When it's all over, amid a sea of crated paintings and human carnage, the defeated General confronts his nemesis, LaBiche/Lancaster, who faces him with a loaded machine gun. "The paintings are mine," he claims. "They always will be; beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it! They will always belong to me or to a man like me. Now, this minute, you couldn't tell me why you did what you did." Lancaster looks at the paintings, then at the bodies, and then at the General. His machine gun answers for him.

To my knowledge, the first act of verbal suicide on film.

Dreaming on PaperPart II

Dreaming on Paper: Matters of Soul

I write this in the Allen Pavilion, a medical center here in the Bronx, NY, to whose emergency room I’ve come to have my left ankle examined and declared either a) broken or b) badly sprained. Needless to say I’m hoping for b).

I twisted it yesterday afternoon coming home from Ben’s Meat Market near my home in Spuyten Duyvil, directly across from the northern tip of Manhattan Island, at the confluence of Hudson and Harlem Rivers in that part of New York City where Babe (Ruth) built a house for the Yankees in 1923.

Because it was filled with prepossessing yellow leaves as I stepped off the curb I didn’t see the pothole waiting there in ambush. My foot went one way, the rest of my body another, my two grocery bags a third, the three cans of chunk light tuna, two rolls of Scott’s bathroom tissue, one bottle of Newman’s Own Caesar dressing, a bag of supposedly triple-washed baby leaf spinach, and a dozen eggs (I’d planned a spinach salad for dinner) each defied gravity in its own way.

Meanwhile the lady in the Lincoln Navigator that had pulled up to a stoplight, seeing me there on all fours with tears in my eyes, rather than ask if I was okay, rolled up her tinted window and waited for the light to change before roaring off. For her I mulled over some ripe epithets, words that I was in too much shock and pain to utter then and that I won’t repeat here, lest you think me not a nice person.

Somehow I hobbled home, where I packed the foot in ice and kept it elevated and did what all the experts tell you to do to keep an injured ankle from inflating to the size of a grapefruit. It worked. It inflated to the size of a pomegranate. The next morning, today, I cancelled all my classes to come here.

Emergency rooms in New York being what they are, despite my having arrived here at ten to seven, it’s unlikely that my foot will be attended by anyone with a medical degree before noon. And so I went to the cafeteria, bought a coffee and have found this perfectly lovely spot outdoors in a grassy courtyard where a dozen tables float serenely under green shade umbrellas. I have propped my adjustable aluminum cane (borrowed from Miriam, my eighty year-old neighbor) against a chair and sit with my journal—a trusty companion in times of waiting—spread open and eager to hear from me.

I am thinking about stories in general, and about short stories in particular, about why people read and write them, and (more specifically) why they are so hard to write—even now, for me, when I’ve been doing it for a quarter of a century.

I don’t mean to imply that short stories are any harder to make than other art forms—than novels or plays or screenplays—or even to say that writing a short story is harder than playing the cello, operating a frozen yogurt concession, or swimming the Bering Straight. Almost anything you do, depending on your standards, can be infinitely easy or hard. A discipline is a discipline, after all, and therefore “hard” not, necessarily, because it is done without joy or pleasure, but because it takes effort and can be frustrating and requires and calls for a good deal of determination, devotion, and patience.

But (I ask myself) why should storytelling, of all things, be in any way, by any measure or means, “hard”? Why—when we tell stories all the time, when storytelling is as much a part of everyday human social intercourse as eating, joking or sex, natural functions accomplished (usually) without the benefit of MFA degrees or how-to books? Why, when most of us tell stories naturally enough in person, does telling them on paper not come just as naturally?

In fact for most of us it doesn’t come naturally at all. Here with me in my shoulder satchel I have a folder stuffed with draft stories, all written in earnest by students devoted to the craft of fiction writing, each of whom wants just as earnestly to become a professional—which is to say, a published—author: each of which fails completely if not miserably on the page.

Again I ask: why? Of the hundred of so stories that I typically read in a semester’s worth of fiction writing workshops, all but two of three will similarly fail. And that most “natural” of human pursuits, that of telling stories to each other, appears no more natural than piloting a stealth bomber, or starting an avocado farm on the moon.

Somehow, somewhere, between the place where stories germinate and bloom in the imagination and where they get put on paper, that natural process has been corrupted, subverted—you might even say perverted. Through a kind of reverse alchemy gold turns to lead, and a process natural and instinctive turns artificial and contrived.

Where does the breakdown occur? What causes its occurrence? What essential ingredient has broken down or been removed—or has some additive polluted the mixture? What’s missing?—or needs to be extricated, like venom, or a tumor?

***

In one of her stories a student of mine writes:

. . . But I never did reveal to her that my world by then had sped up at a lightning pace, caught in the dunes of life’s unspectacular and bewildering realities, my head already filled with myriad conflicting emotions, my heart frozen and thawed many times over.

When some people first set out to write stories (you’ll notice I said “write” and not “tell”)—and even when some have been writing for many years—they operate under a deadly misconception: they think that stories are about language, rather than about the things that language exists to evoke or convey.

Look at the sample above. What is being conveyed or evoked here? The short answer: not much beyond words, words that neither describe nor connote but that remain abstractions, as though pressed like dead leaves between the pages of a dictionary. Where is the world? Where are the people? Where is the story? While it’s essential to grasp that stories, along with the characters and everything else they hold, are made of language and nothing but language, it’s just as important to understand that, with rare exceptions (Ulysses comes to mind; so does Lolita) a story is never about language: anyway it’s never exclusively about language.

And yet the above passage gives us nothing else. It is, essentially, a piece of writing turned inward against itself—like the mythical Ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail. The subject of the passage, in so far as it has a subject, is the way in which the passage has been written. In other words it was written to call attention to itself and by extension to its author.

Did my student know she was doing this? Did she intend to draw attention to herself? Knowing her I can safely answer, No. In fact she is an extremely shy, almost pathologically self-effacing person. So how to explain what has happened here? How does a shy, self-effacing person end up creating the verbal equivalent of a Times Square billboard that says LOOK AT ME! in flashing neon?

The answer lies in the perverting machinations of self-consciousness, and the defensive measures we deploy to protect and preserve our spun-sugar egos, and which, when it comes to writing, anyway, are about as advantageous as throwing gasoline on a banked fire. On behalf of our praise-starved egos, that they may gorge themselves on the astonishment of our peers, we show off, or try to, and in so doing achieve that which we had hoped to avoid: making asses of ourselves.

All, or most, of this, happens unconsciously. Except for clowns and sitcom stars, no one really wants to make a fool of herself. But the ego has its own agenda, distinct from and often at odds with its host, who merely wants to be good and/or to do well. It is why egos can’t write, and why writers can’t or shouldn’t write with their egos.

But that is easier said than done. For the self-serving ego has many, many tricks up its sleeve. It is a saboteur, lying in wait—like a pothole covered in yellow leaves, just waiting to see you trip and fall.

Here are some ways by which we sabotage our stories.


1. Self-Consciousness.

Not long ago I watched a video of Marlon Brando being interviewed by Larry King. It was an old interview, obviously, done some years before Marlon died gasping and half-blind at age 80 in 2004. In the interest of full-disclosure I should say two things here: first, that Marlon was and will always be a hero of mine. Had my destiny been a tad less stingy, I’d have been an actor, like him, and as famous. Secondly, though I always thought him the greatest of male actors, it must be said that the same man who exuded musk in Streetcar, mumbled his way to a refused Oscar in The Godfather, and broke countless middle-aged men’s hearts in Last Tango, could be quite the asshole in person. Excepting Charles Manson and Norman Mailer, no other celebrity or public figure of any kind has gone to greater lengths to thumb his nose at his public.

The interview with King is typical, with Marlon up to his usual hostile-witness tactics, refusing straightforward answers to perfectly innocent, if banal, questions, especially with regard to acting—a profession he always disdained, or claimed to, even as he fattened himself silly on the fortunes it paid him.

When not kissing his host or wiping the sweat from Larry’s forehead, Marlon lofted his usual self-denigrating assertion that everyone’s an actor:

Everybody here in this room is an actor. You’re an actor and the best performances I’ve ever seen is when the director says cut and the director says that was great. That was wonderful. That was good. . . When you say how do you do, how are you, you look fine, you’re doing two things at once. You’re reading the person’s real intention. You’re trying to feel who he is and making an assessment and trying to ignore the mythology.


Perhaps because he was sweating so much under the camera lights, or possibly under the intense glare of Brando’s fame (and knowing Marlon’s penchant for turning his interviewers into piñatas), Larry King failed to challenge Marlon’s theory by pointing out that, while everyone may be an actor offstage, the moment you point a camera at most they become, well, lousy actors.

This is what happens to writers much of the time. Call it performance anxiety. And the greater our desire to be writers, to be seen and admired and judged as writers, the more vulnerable we are to it. The mere act of thinking of oneself as a writer and not, say, as a storyteller, or better still as someone who tells stories—or, even better: as someone with a story to tell—is an act of self-consciousness, and therefore an act of self-sabotage.

Attached to this notion of being “a writer” are a myriad of misunderstandings, misconceptions and self-deceptions all groomed to the ego’s gratification, but which are in league against those qualities that best equip us to do what (fiction) writers are meant to do: tell stories.

Roughly, and in no particular order, the misconceptions are as follows: that “a writer” is a romantic, exotic, quixotic individual, Don Quixote with a crow-quill pen in place of a jousting stick. Or, if not a white knight, he’s a dashing wit in a sparkling white linen suit, a boulevardier with a steno pad tucked in his breast pocket next to his cigarillo case (see: Twain, Wolfe—not Thomas, Tom). prefer something a little more macho? Try Teddy Roosevelt with a typewriter (Hemingway). Should my female readers feel left out, there are stereotypes for women writers, too: the suicidal modernist wading into a river with an overcoat stuffed with stones; the unbearably gifted young poetess with one foot in eternity and one head in an oven (except for Ayn Rand—who would have poured Virginia and Sylvia both into skyscraper foundations—and Emily Dickinson, embalmed like a fly in the amber of obscurity—the great women-author-genius stereotypes all seem to have done themselves in).

What gets lost or forgotten when we think of ourselves as writers is that first and foremost a storyteller must be a human being: not an extraordinary human being, necessarily, or an exemplary one, or even a particularly kind or intelligent human being. It is a person’s ordinariness, combined with his or her desire to tell stories about the lives of others who are essentially ordinary, that makes a writer good if not great. And it is this ordinariness that we shun or negate in embracing for ourselves the label “writer,” with its blinding twinkle and flash.

Imagine a cobbler so self-conscious in his “art” that he forgets that a shoe, however beautiful, must fit a person’s foot and allow him to walk in comfort. The conceited cobbler is a much a contradiction in terms as an egomaniacal monk. To the extent that a man puts his ego in charge of his actions (or executes his actions in service of his ego), his actions fail to serve any higher purpose. A writer who writes for the sake of his or her ego is a poor writer.

Or imagine of a real spy decked out in a white dinner tuxedo, like Sean Connery in Thunderball, with a scarlet carnation in his boutonniere and a Playboy bunny in each arm. How long do you suppose before his cover’s blown?

For storytellers here’s a more relevant question: when reading our stories, how far will our readers get before we blow our covers and let it be known to all the world that, alas, we’re not really here to tell stories: we’re here to be writers.

***

I was just interrupted by a fat man in a hospital robe who wandered over to my table to hit me up for a dollar that I didn’t give him. Undeterred, he sat down with me and told me his dream. Someday, he said, he wants to go to Harvard, get a business degree and make six hundred thousand dollars a year.

I suspect he is here for psychiatric purposes. Still I asked him why six hundred thousand a year: why not a million, or several million, or a tens of millions? My question seemed to confuse him—that or it struck him as impertinent.

We changed the subject, or rather we deflected it. We talked about education. I told him I was a teacher, and explained to him that most of my undergraduates (not my adult writing students) rarely availed themselves of my office hours, but that those who did invariably performed better and saw their grades improve. I said, “If you do go to college, Wilbur” (he said his name was Wilbur; I believed him) “don’t hesitate to ask your professors for help. That’s what they’re there for. And if you ask for help, they’ll be glad to give it to you.” I thought this advice worth at least as much as the dollar he had asked for.

I also suggested that he consider a less fabled university, one with a little less ivy clinging to its walls, a good state school, maybe. “There are lots of good ones to choose from,” I said. To which he admitted, rather shyly, that he’d never had much of whatever it took to “be a good student.”

“This time,” he promised both himself and me, “I’m gonna give it everything I got.” Here again I believed him.

I tell this “story” for several reasons. First, because it happened just as I say it did, in the midst of my ruminations about storytelling. But mainly to illustrate that the storyteller’s art and his or her job are one: they are to tell the truth. Whether it’s the factual truth or a made-up truth doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the truth.

And nothing is more humbling than the truth, or the task of telling it.

And every situation that life presents us with is an opportunity for story. Take this portly inpatient and his earnestly expressed desire to attend an ivy-league university and get filthy rich. Might he be the protagonist of a story, or its antagonist? Supposing our protagonist-narrator is a Professor of Behavioral Studies at Harvard and, out of guilt for not having given him a dollar, but also with an ulterior career motive, offers instead to become his tutor? What consequences might result from such a decision? What if he, our protagonist, uses Wilber as the unwitting subject of a test, one that goes awry?

A writer is someone who, like a bear or a rat sniffing for food, is always sniffing around for fictional opportunities. In Henry James’ words, he is one of the people “on whom nothing is wasted.”


2. “Talent” and “Genius.”

Among things that occasion and exacerbate self-consciousness are misunderstandings connected with these two words. Talent is passion seized early in life, and the fearlessness attendant to knowing, thinking, or believing that we are “meant to do” a thing. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, the brute Stanley Kowalski says, “Luck is believing you’re lucky.” He could have said the same of talent, which, among other things, is believing that you’re talented.

Typically we believe that we’re talented because, at some point early in life, this “fact” was impressed upon us by someone whose opinion, for better or worse, we held high—usually a parent; often a teacher or some older person. The principle difference between those who can sing and those who can’t hold a tune is that the former were told that they could sing. Or anyway they weren’t told that they couldn’t.

Does this account for those with freakish talent? No, it doesn’t. But it accounts for all the rest. And “freakish talent” isn’t the subject here. Freakish talent gets its own whole book written by someone who knows a thing about it.

Talent lifts us out of self-consciousness and, depending on just how talented we believe we are, propels us up into the cloudless, fearless, heights. But like any catalyst, lubricant or impetus, to work talent needs to be applied to something. Namely it needs to be applied to industry, to practice, performance, to discipline. Like luck, it exists only to the extent that some goal or process is touched by it.

And like luck, talent can be fickle. If it’s easier for the young and inexperienced to be “talented,” it’s simply because their ability to believe in things like “talent” hasn’t yet been tainted by the vicissitudes, by things like rejection and criticism, by a million-and-one little voices whispering “no” in our ears.

Or by plain bad luck. I once believed that I could write songs. Therefore for a while I was a “talented” songwriter. Then a black Labrador named Gus mauled my left hand—the hand I used to fret my guitar, the instrument on which I wrote my songs. Overnight, it seems, I stopped believing that writing songs was something that I was “meant to do.” I stopping feeling “talented.” I accepted the musical verdict of an unfriendly black Lab. The dog ate my “talent.”

Time is as kind to talent as it is to dairy products. When people say, “Talent doesn’t last,” they don’t lie.

But perseverance lasts, and so does skill. While talent may be cruelly excised by mean dogs or diminish otherwise over time, skill accumulates. This explains why now, pushing ninety, John Updike is arguably as good or better a writer as he was at twenty-five. If he seems less “talented” now than then it’s because we’ve come to expect great things of him, even to take him for granted. And because in our culture the word “talented” is associated with flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked youth, not with gray old men.

Genius is something else altogether. Apart from scoring 140 or higher on your SATs (which measures a kind of genius, intellectual genius), artistic genius is knowing and working well within your limits. In training or in rehearsal, and in selecting works for study, good artists always stretch beyond those limits. But in creating their works for consumption they know exactly what those limits are and keep within them.

I don’t mean to imply that great artists don’t challenge themselves; not at all. I’m only saying that a great or even modestly successful artist knows the difference between practice and performance.

Amateurs, on the other hand, are always exceeding their limits, or trying to, and for the most part failing. They use techniques that they haven’t thoroughly digested or properly understood, let alone mastered, and fling freshly discovered words still reeking of thesaurus. In their anxiety to be “original” (a word that, to them, is synonymous with “artist”) like the Starship Enterprise they want to boldly go where no one has ever gone before—that’s where they think they’re going. In fact they’re bound for disaster, where showing off usually leads us.

To invite failure via experimentation isn’t a bad thing; in fact it’s a good thing, a necessary thing from time to time. Only know that when invited odds are failure will show up.


3. Lack of Familiarity with the Form

To those who wished to master poetry Alexander Pope had these three words of advice, “First, be correct.” [CHK] By this he meant master existing poetic forms: couplets, sestina, villanelle, sonnet, terza rima, and so on. For the fiction writer the forms are more prosaic. Chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, punctuation.

The short story is itself a form to which principles apply. For a start it should have a beginning, a middle, and end. It promises certain things and it delivers on those promises. It has a theme or several possible themes, but usually one grand or inclusive theme that can be expressed in a word or a few words. It leaves us fully satisfied, but also surprised, wanting nothing more or less.

There are two ways to master form: through absorption and through imitation. By “absorption” I mean very simply by reading: by taking stories into our bloodstreams through our eyes and through our “ears”: not the physical ears through which normal sounds reach us, but the mind’s ears, the ones with which we “hear” the sounds that words make on paper. In some these mental ears are well developed and highly sensitive; in others they must be cultivated.

Those who read with an eye toward mastering form may look forward to never again enjoying reading entirely for its own sake, as pure entertainment. “How Nellie Lost her Knickers” no longer matters nearly as much to us as how Nellie’s creator goes about making us care whether or not she loses them or how. Reading for mastery means reading for technique. It means being aware of plot, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, words and punctuation—the very things that as ordinary or “civilian” readers we hope to surrender our awareness of when immersed in a story.

The professional (for lack of any better word) reader is both aware of the effect being achieved, and of how it’s being achieved. She’s aware of the ropes and pulleys and switches being manipulated behind the scenery, of the stage manager rushing to warn the actors of their cues. This needn’t detract from her amusement. On the contrary, she gets two performances for the price of one: the one on stage, and the one in the wings.

I’m always amazed by how many of my students, young and old, don’t read at all, let alone for form. This explains why, among other things, they don’t know how to format dialogue: they’ve rarely seen it formatted, and seeing it they haven’t noticed it; and noticing it they haven’t examined it, and examining it they haven’t studied it. To read with an eye for technique and form is to access the greatest writing instructors of all time: of any time, as a matter of fact. Want to study with Shakespeare? For a trip to the bookshelf he’s all yours. A free private seminar with Joyce, or Virginia Woolf? Just open up one of their books. And yet as available as these great teachers are to all of us it’s amazing how few students of fiction writing avail themselves of them.

Some students of mine (and please don’t get the idea that my students are all a bunch of dunces; most of them are accomplished, if not brilliant: I speak here mainly of my undergraduates, who indeed have much to learn) don’t even know what a paragraph is, let alone a paragraph break or, heaven forbid, an indent. It’s reached the point where I’ve considered campaigning for an official holiday, NATIONAL PARAGRAPH INDENT DAY, a day on which every good citizen takes a moment to reflect upon the humble beauty of that blank white space that heralds the inception of every paragraph—or that used to, anyway, once upon a time: before the Internet and email conspired to do away with such formalities altogether, since they don’t translate consistently or easily into HTML code: since before we surrendered our aesthetic principles to semi-literate computer geeks.

If on the other hand you simply can’t see the beauty of a genuine paragraph, or, for that matter, you can’t experience the thrill of a well-placed comma much as you do a sublime chord change in a piece of music or a sly shift in texture or color in a painting, then know that you haven’t yet developed your inner (visual) ear, that you don’t know how to hear with your eyes.

It’s okay to not know, as long as you know that you don’t know, meaning you’re willing and eager to learn.

What, exactly, do we mean when we say “form”? The shapes of things (of sentences, paragraphs, etc.), but also smaller things, the things that help to hone and qualify those shapes (commas, periods, indents). The handling of such things as syntax (the arrangement of words) and punctuation (the stresses and pauses between them), as well as the choice of the words themselves (the level of diction), result in what, overall, is sometimes called tone.

Beyond reading it, another way to master form (to “be correct”) is to imitate it. Yes, imitate—as in copy. In this age wherein so much emphasis is put on “originality” and “creativity” and “self-expression,” the very word “imitate” smacks of kowtowing to authority while surrendering one’s very soul. But imitation, as everybody knows, is the highest form of flattery or praise, meaning it’s a form of emulation. And emulation is a form of appreciation. And to appreciate something is to take it to heart, to absorb it into one’s soul. It’s a first step toward making something one’s own.

I know of one writing exercise, seldom used anymore, that has students take the first pages of a book or story by a favorite author and type (in this book I’ll be using the word “type” as a synonym for “keyboard,” “keyboard” being four letters and one syllable too many) them verbatim. By this means the student gets to “feel” the words as if he wrote them himself. This goes a step beyond hearing the words with our inner ears to actually feeling them with our fingers as we type, and even (possibly) breathing and moving our bodies to the rhythms of another author’s sentences. In this way we absorb those sentences even more thoroughly into our bloodstreams: they inhabit us. We are exercising our mental ears, playing the scales using a favorite author’s words.

Having imitated, we then emulate, setting our own stories (in our own words) to an exemplary author’s formal “music.” We write a story or a passage that sounds like or has the shape and feel of a Hemingway story, or one by Grace Paley, or John Cheever, or Chekhov. Given time we’re sure to outgrow the authors we emulate, to find that our contents no longer fit in their forms. Some call it rebellion. I prefer to think of it simply as moving on.

To imitate form is simply to borrow the glass into which you pour your own wine. One can’t imitate plot or duplicate a “type” of character or commit to paper a familiar string of words without sacrificing emotional sincerity and thus committing a cliché. To imitate content is to err thus. But one can imitate and even duplicate tone without doing so, since tone is not a matter of content, but of form.

The extent to which certain people will tend instinctively to imitate form and not content, and vice-versa, may well be in direct proportion to their talent. In fact, it may even determine it.


4. Bad Taste

Two things cause bad taste: lack of critical awareness and emotional frigidity. Usually, these two things go hand in hand. When I say “emotional frigidity,” I don’t mean to imply that those with bad taste have no feelings, only that their feelings are operating on automatic pilot. Instead of responding purely to the information provided to them by their senses, they respond more or less by rote, according to what they believe or have been told their responses should be. Thus, when it comes time to paint the bedroom or choose a wedding gift, they paint the bedroom some insipid pastel shade, a numbing beige or ivory or milky lavender, having read in some good housekeeping magazine that this is just the thing to do; and the wedding gift, meanwhile, has turned as if by magic into a (surprise!) sterling silverware set.

Not to say that there is anything intrinsically wrong with a beige bedroom, nor with silverware. But let’s be honest: these are not choices from the heart, nor are they the fruit of any aesthetic or artistic judgment. They are products rather of received wisdom, unchallenged and unearned, as “borrowed” as whatever the bride carried along with items old, new, and blue.

As writers—let alone as artists—we cannot afford to paint our bedrooms beige. We need to risk forming our own judgments and, possibly, violating the aesthetics of others. But in so doing at least we avoid the worst taste of all, that which rushes in to fill the void left by an insufficiently developed or atrophied set of sensibilities. I’m talking (again) about clichés: for when an artist fails to make genuine, specific choices—fails, in other words, to guard against the familiar and obvious, to keep them at bay by means of his imagination, what rushes in?

Cliché.

Cliché is to writers what a remote control is to a lazy couch potato. It is that which is most accessible through least effort. It’s why people order pizza from Dominoes when, it’s safe to say, there are finer pizzas to be had in this world. Ditto McDonald’s hamburgers (I wonder: will the corporate spear-chuckers at McDonald’s sue me, claiming their popularity due strictly to the superiority of their products? Doubt it.).

It—meaning bad taste and cliché both, for they’re essentially the same thing— is why, by and large, our bestsellers are so bad, or anyway they’re not so good: for sure they’re not the best books. They aren’t the best books because—again, by and large— they’ve been chosen by folks who, rather than exercise their own critical judgment and loosen their purse strings accordingly, have accepted received wisdom (whatever it’s shortcomings, received wisdom has this virtue: it’s convenient). And so they read what they read because, well, everyone else is reading it.

Many of the most popular things, especially those things that may be said to be trendy, are popular by default, meaning that the mass or conglomerate will has lacked the force to resist them. Jennifer Aniston—whose name and face may well and mercifully be forgotten by the time you read this—is hardly as lovely as Kim Bassinger, nor anywhere near as gifted an actress as Meryl Streep. And yet as I write this she’s equally if not more popular. Why? Because the same mass audience that gobbles up Big Macs and guzzles Diet Pepsi has made her so. To the mass audience her very mediocrity is cause for celebration: she is irresistible because there is nothing there to resist.

When one has never exercised one’s critical judgment; when one’s aesthetic sensibilities have been formed inside a vacuum of mindless consumerism; when one’s taste buds have been systematically scalded and sandpapered by hype and by the mob psychology engendered by it; when one can no longer distinguish the taste of water from that of wine, and yet—knowing the value of nothing but the cost of everything— still knows a bargain when one sees one . . . guess what gets drunk? Bad taste, in other words, is no taste at all. It is what happens when our sensibilities take the path of least resistance, succumbing to the combined forces of private inertia and public propaganda. It is bargain basement taste—since what you buy with it belongs, ultimately, in the basement.

How to tend our sensibilities and keep them from being sandpapered?

First, resist mass opinion. With all your heart and soul resist it. Resist it for your own artistic good, but also for the good of society as a whole. Society needs you; I need you. Distrust all forms of advertising. Resist all pre-packaged ideas and opinions as you would the claims of a carnival barker, the sermons of a soapbox preacher, or the prescriptions of a quack.

This may not always be fun. It will likely render you unpopular with those who, unlike yourself, have cheerily and unconditionally surrendered their best instincts. To some you will be labeled a “killjoy,” one of those people who can’t read a book, watch a movie or even eat a pizza without assailing his fellows with his vastly superior powers of critical judgment. To these difficulties several remedies suggest themselves: a) find a new set of friends who, like you, wish to strengthen or at least preserve their souls or b) keep your opinions to yourself while pretending to enjoy yourself or c) really do enjoy yourself, but with the understanding that you have willfully, temporarily suspended critical judgment in order to do so. Some might call this last technique “slumming,” and those who engage in it “snobs.” But if done well, that is, discreetly, odds are good that you’ll never be caught in the act.

And who’s to say? For all you know, all those critically challenged friends you find yourselves surrounded by? They’re slumming, too.

***

To sum up: sensibility aligns itself with the soul, identity with ego, thus:



IDENTITY= EGO

SENSIBILITY = SOUL



5. Lack of Basic Technical Skills.

It should go without saying that to write fiction one needs to be able to spell, punctuate, conjugate, identify the parts of a sentence (and know, for instance, whether or not a subject agrees with a verb), let alone how to evoke characters, build a scene or render dialogue.

It doesn’t. Many of my undergraduates (the same undergraduates who can’t tell a paragraph from a sprained ankle) can’t use a comma worth a damn; others don’t use them at all. To some a sentence is anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a period—and those are the ones with high standards. Others have been taught never to use a one-syllable word when a four-syllable word—preferably one whose meaning is obscure to them—will do. To be clear is to be dull; to be grammatical is to be square; to be direct is to be disingenuous. And anyway it’s too much of a bother.

The one rhetorical “asset” they do tend to value is the most dubious: a large vocabulary. Strange, how the same people who, in normal life, wouldn’t be caught dead using words and phrases like “conversed,” “purchased” and “continued to” commit to them with blind allegiance in their prose. The same words that, on the playground in third grade, would have won little Melville a shiner, he now, as an undergraduate, expects will earn him an “A” on his research paper.

And maybe he’s right; and maybe that’s just the problem. Somewhere along the line many if not most of us have been taught by miserable teachers always to use high formal diction in writing academic papers. That is because, presumably, our professors are so distinguished that, as do those invited to Stockholm to accept their Nobel Prizes, they must approach their benefactors in white tie and tails. They must, in other words, gussy themselves up to look important, whether they are or not. This is called Pomp, and too often it isn’t in keeping with Circumstance.

What good writers want from their students isn’t the verbal equivalent of soup and fish or any form of pomp or pretension. What they want is communication, is clarity, is the honest-to-god humble truth expressed as simply, as directly as possible. The best—not the biggest—words. The most elegant—not the most convoluted and labyrinthine—sentences.

The trouble is that for most people to write clearly and simply is more, not less, difficult than writing pretentiously, obscurely. If nothing else, pretension and obscurity can hide the fact that we have little if anything really to say.

They serve another fine purpose, too. They impress idiots. And in case you haven’t noticed there are a lot of idiots around, most of them with big fat PhD’s that they have earned by writing “academic” papers that you and I cannot read, much less understand. Should the humble likes of us begin to understand their drivel, it would spell doom not only for their careers, but for academia in general.

We wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

To be easily understood, we are taught, is the hallmark of shallowness.

By the time they enter my undergraduate classes already somehow my students have grasped this notion: they have learned the name of the game and the name of the game is Bullshit. And it is up to me to help them unlearn it: a task as challenging in its own way as picking fly crap out of a mound of black pepper with boxing gloves on.

Which is to say that sometimes to learn the basic skills we have to unlearn those that aren’t basic: we must unmaster the Art of Bullshit.


6. Discipline

In an age of convenience, discipline is a commodity as scarce as it is disparaged. We pay lip service to it; we pretend to hold it in high esteem, as we hold wood stoves and steamships in high esteem. But when it comes to heating our homes or traveling, we turn to more practical means, to electric stoves and passenger jets.

Quick and Easy: those are the bywords of the Age of Convenience. They are what advertisers promise us—the same advertisers who’ve convinced us not only that we’re entitled to “the good life,” but that it’s available, affordable, and easy to use.

Of all pursuits, writing may be among the least practical, the least affordable, the least “easy to use.” If it’s a way to get rich, it must be among the very hardest ways. Nor is writing, as pursuits go, likely to increase your popularity, decrease your waistline, or furnish the key to a happy-go-lucky existence. In fact it’s more likely to make you miserable while increasing your blood pressure and aggravating your sciatica. At the very least it will make you contemplative, if not introspective. And as Saul Bellow quipped, “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life makes you want to kill yourself.” At both ends that’s an exaggeration. But if unqualified happiness is your goal then writing is no way to achieve it.

What writing gives you, or can give you, is satisfaction: the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made something, a satisfaction not unlike the satisfaction of a cabinet worker who turns raw material into functional beauty, only instead of wood, glue, nails, stain and varnish you work with thoughts, dreams, imagination, experience.

And just as the cabinetmaker gets up every morning and goes to work in his or her workshop, the writer goes to his studio and works. The difference is that a cabinet maker’s raw materials are tactile and present: to access them he needs only to go to the lumberyard, or look on a shelf. When a writer goes to work, he isn’t always sure where the next thought or inspiration will come from, or if it will come at all. He sits down at his computer, or in front of a blank sheet of paper. Maybe he does research; maybe he writes a few letters to warm himself up. Maybe he sharpens pencils or goes about some other talismanic gesture. Maybe he meditates, or paces, or prays. Or maybe he just sits there and waits, pencil in hand, keyboard under his fingers, patient as Job. Or he drags himself to his task with grim determination, gritting his teeth, squeezing every dry cell in his brain, putting down sentence after sentence that he subsequently erases with as much bilious fury as went into their composition. One way or another, calmly or anxiously, slowly or quickly, gently or with violent passion, he gets down to work.

Most who sign up for writing workshops and other classes do so for one reason: they’re looking for discipline. They’re looking outside themselves for something that exists inside. The discipline of attending a class every Tuesday night after work is a different discipline than that of going alone into a studio, without audience, witnesses or comrades, and setting to work. The writer’s inward drive can’t be artificially aroused or induced. Teachers and workshop leaders may give assignments and set deadlines, and those deadlines may result in productivity, but they can’t replace a writer’s inner drive. Or they can, artificially, but take away the assignments and deadlines and the “inner drive” disappears, because it was never real to begin with.

The sort of discipline student writers seek is the self-generating kind, the kind that can’t find satisfaction without work—without the particular work of writing. When students ask for discipline (and they do) what they’re really asking for, hoping for, is to become the sort of person who, if she misses a day in the studio, turns miserable. That inward drive, if it exists at all, must be satisfied—just as the drive for sex or hunger must be satisfied if it exists. A writer is someone who writes, someone who needs not to have written but to be writing in order to feel alive and more or less content—or at least not miserable. Does writing make writers happy? No, not really. That is, it doesn’t change the writer’s essential nature, which is ruminative and therefore never quite satisfied or at peace. But it relieves their chronic dissatisfaction; it eases their unhappiness, which feels almost as good. Like the man who bangs himself repeatedly on the head with a hammer. Why? Because when he stops it feels good.

That’s as good a description of a writer’s discipline as any I’ve ever heard.

There’s another side to this matter of discipline that’s not quite so grim, in fact it’s not grim at all: in fact it’s blissful. I’m talking about concentration, about that very special place where the disciplined mind goes if only it is disciplined enough, meaning if only it is patient and willing to put up with enough discomfort and pain to reach its ultimate destination, that pinpoint in time where nothing else matters but the very little thing that one is trying to accomplish right now: the thought, the sentence, the word, the nuance, the rhythm, the shade, the color—whatever it is that the concentrated mind is as intent on as the seamstress is intent, at the moment when she must pass the thread through the eye of the needle, on the tip of that thread and the needle’s eye. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists. When the writer (or anyone else for that matter) achieves concentration, the rest of the world does a fine disappearing act. Past and future cease to exist. There are no goals beyond the present goal. For a painter, that goal may be a brushstroke, or achieving a certain shape, or color. For the writer again it may be choosing a single word. However much time it takes, the writer is willing to take that time. He’s willing because there’s no such thing as time. In its blissful concentrated state, the mind knows no minutes or hours or days. It lives in the eternal present where all anxieties connected to time—to the past and the future (and, if you think about it, all anxieties have to do either to the past or the future), no longer bear any weight or have any say. They bear no weight because they don’t exist.

This sense of timelessness (and it’s no mere sensation; when we’re not aware of time it might as well not exist) can be dangerous. Back when I was still a painter, when traveling in Europe I would do watercolors. I’d set myself up with my painting supplies and my little Italian folding leather stool (my beloved sediolino) and go to work on some outdoor scene, starting usually in the morning and finishing some time in the middle of the afternoon. I did this all the time. When working outdoors for obvious reasons it’s best to choose a location that won’t expose you to direct sunlight. For one thing, direct sunlight makes your colors dry too quickly. For another, you can get badly sunstroked. The problem, of course, is that the sun moves, and what was an ideal spot at ten in the morning has, by two o’clock, turned into a recipe for siriasis. From my blissful state of concentration I’d emerge into the dazzling sunlight, faint with hunger and thirst, my nose, cheeks and forearms roasted to an undiluted cadmium red. Bliss can do that to you. It doesn’t know any consequences—or it doesn’t know them until it’s too late.

But unless outfitted with a considerable skylight the writer in her studio needn’t worry about sunstroke. Phone calls may go unanswered. Trips to the bathroom may be put off to an extent unhealthy for the bladder. Matters of hygiene and grooming tend to be ignored. Coffee grows cold and scummy in cups. By writers such things are looked upon as the cost of victory. The pride of having achieved a good days’ work more than compensates for the disgrace of having spent that same day with one’s hair uncombed, one’s face unwashed, and one’s zipper down. You’ll look good tomorrow—or anyway in time to accept your National Book Award.

If discipline and the concentration it produces is heaven then by logical extension lack of concentration must be hell. For a writer that’s so. I believe that writers and artists (all creative people) live for concentration: for those moments when there is only the one moment and nothing else matters. One definition of pain: wanting to be where you’re not, to be doing what you’re not doing. When were not concentrating we’re in pain. The pain may be as mild as an itch, or a very dull ache, or it may feel as if you’re being branded with a white-hot iron. Either way it qualifies as pain. Others escape the pain of not leading ideal lives by keeping as busy as possible, by buying and selling, by building and trading, by dividing and conquering, by engaging in as many forms of professional and social commerce and intercourse they can squeeze into their daily planners. They make money, they raise families, they volunteer for charity organizations. They do lots of good, while also inflicting great damage on the environment and making a hell of a ruckus. When not adding to what they’ve already got by way of material odds and ends, they thrash about in an effort to to maintain their status-quo. They challenge the limits of the body (sports) and the mind (science, technology, the arts). They love breaking records, not realizing—or do they? —that what they’re breaking is an old civilization to make way for one that is presumably (but probably not) better.

The artist (read: writer) certainly plays her role in this ruckus. She doesn’t exist apart from it, not entirely. She may break records, and join charities, and fight for the future while clinging to the past like everyone else.

But when fully engaged in her work she feels none of that struggle: the material world is replaced by a world of instincts and ideas, of forms that may seem every bit as real to those of us who dream on paper as the forms of material, tangible things, but which in fact are purely conceptual, purely matters of spirit and mind, mental constructs—as impalpable as music or math. The world of concentration is painless because there are no things in it: only materials of the mind and soul; nothing with points or corners or edges, nothing with reference to the body, its vulnerabilities, deficits and needs. When we enter the divine realm of concentration the first thing we lose is the world, the second is our body. We become that which we presume we were before being born, and that which we hope to be again after we die. We become pure spirit, or as close to it as we can reasonably expect to become while still living and breathing.

In asking for discipline we’re really asking to be transformed out of the realm of the living: we’re asking for a pure heavenly slice of our own weightless souls.


7. In Summary

The writer is someone who writes, who makes a habit of writing but also of reading and thinking like a writer, whose character is formed to fit these habits.

Putting words on paper (or screen) is only a result of these habits, only a result of cultivating that character. And—by the way—only one of many results. There are others.

The fiction writer’s job is to convey experience, to do so in a spirit of generosity and by the grace of concentration, which leads to bliss, and which can be had only through discipline.

The Comformator

On Wednesday afternoons I helped my stepfather at his store. It was the least I could do. I didn’t want my mother’s new husband to think I hated him, only to know that I didn’t love him. And Ed Bigelow had his good qualities. He was well-groomed, fastidious, predictable—you could set your watch by him, that’s how predictable he was. He ate the same two three-and-a-half minute eggs with dry toast every morning for breakfast, and the same ham and cheese sandwich on rye with a cup of soup at the Doughboy Restaurant for lunch. Ed Bigelow was honest. He would never lie to or cheat you. He paid his bills—or did up to the very end. He kept a tidy house and mowed his lawn fairway short and hosed his neighbor’s hydrangeas when they went away. He smoked a briar pipe at the store and a corncob on weekends and holidays. In the days when ice cream came in three flavors by his own reckoning Ed Bigelow was “plain vanilla.”

Bigelow Hats was located (“conveniently,” according to the display ad in the Bowler News Times) on Main Street, between the Post Office and the Union Trust Savings & Loan Company. On Wednesdays business was slow, but lately it had been slow every day.

Once the town of Bowler supported four hat stores. Now only my stepfather’s store—his “haberdashery,” he called it (though other than hats the only men’s items he sold were umbrellas and an occasional scarf)—survived barely. By the time he and my mother married his profits had been flat for three years, and he was in hock to the Union Trust next door. Had she known this it’s doubtful that my mother would have married him, in fact she wouldn’t have. But she didn’t know. She knew only that Ed Bigelow didn’t work in a hat factory, that he dressed well, that he smelled of sweet pipe tobacco and cologne, that his fingernails were cut square and polished without a trace of factory grime under them, that he was a childless widower who lived in a grand Victorian house on Crown Hill Avenue, with a wraparound porch, stained windows and an octagonal turret and a circular driveway edged with day lilies.

When she learned that he was going broke my mother did all she could to get Ed Bigelow to sell his hat store and embark on some more profitable pursuit. Ed Bigelow wouldn’t hear of it. To him hats were more than just a way of making money: they were a symbol of man’s progress, of his pride. Hats were synonymous with civilization: you could scarcely have one without the other. For a man to be seen in public without a hat was equivalent to going shoeless or shirtless, or of not bathing. It meant that he was a bum, or a slob, or both. Even the lowest factory employee, a back shop worker or a boiler room attendant, wore a hat in public if he had any couth. It might be a rough hat of the cheapest wool felt, or just a tweed or leather cap, and badly stained and battered to boot, but he would wear it and wear it with no less pride than that with which a king wore his crown. That more and more men went around hatless was, to my stepfather, nothing more or less than a symptom of that most modern form of temporary insanity known as fashion, the saving grace of which was that, whatever latest horrors it brought forth, those horrors were sure to be as transient and vulnerable as the germs of a summer flu. The symptoms might drag on for days or weeks or months, but eventually the white corpuscles of common sense would come to the rescue, bringing men back to their senses (and back to their derbies, their fedoras, their trilbys, their pork pies and homburgs). Like storm clouds the dark days of hatlessness would pass.

Meanwhile, was it any wonder that mankind faced nuclear annihilation? On a planet where men still wore their hats, such a prospect would have been, if not unthinkable, highly unlikely. Such was my stepfather’s view of things. In the world according to Edward P. Bigelow, hats alone would save humanity from self-destruction.

* * *

That Wednesday it rained, an unyielding downpour that started the night before and continued all afternoon. I arrived with Gilbert on foot, each of us with our umbrellas. Seeing me, Ed Bigelow shook my hand (he always shook my hand; Ed Bigelow was a dedicated and proficient hand-shaker) and said with a wink, “What’s up, there, sport?” To which I replied, per our little vaudeville routine, “I don’t know, Ed, what’s up with you?” Gas prices are up, taxes are up, unemployment is up, and hats are up! But respect for elders is definitely down! Delivered with a rabbit-punch to my shoulder.

Gilbert and I jammed our umbrellas into a receptacle by the door, above which a bell tinkled, warning my stepfather in the rare event of a customer’s entry. To either side of the door a plate glass window framed a carefully arranged display. Since it was summer, Panamas dominated the left-hand window display, with a yellow streamer announcing “Straws to cover every head type in town!” and a humorous touch provided by daisies and a smiling sun scissored from construction paper. The right-hand window featured an assortment of felt fedoras revolving like planets around a large papier maché globe, with maps of the world stapled to a chintz backdrop of sky blue and models of various forms of transport—planes, busses and trains—dangling from the same fishing lines as the Spitfires in my bedroom. The slogan for this display was “See the World in a Caxton-Dumont!” The effect, I must admit, was ingenious, or would have been were it not mostly obscured by my stepfather’s recently installed neon sign:

Bigelow & Son
Since 1898

The sign’s flashing insistent modernity jarred badly with the sober gold-leaf cursive on the other window and would have, in my opinion, better suited a pool hall or a pawnshop. Oh, yes, that “& Son”? That was supposed to be me. In three years, as soon as I turned sixteen, Ed Bigelow and I would be partners.

Usually on my visits to my stepfather’s store I would dust the display cases, or steam-clean the hats that weren’t in glass cases and that had accumulated gray patinas of sticky dust. Or I’d polish the big, plate glass windows, or vacuum the carpet, or buff the many mirrors big and small, ovoid and rectangular, hand-held and screwed to walls, in which customers admired or disapproved of their hat-wearing selves. Or, if there was nothing else to do, I’d sit in my stepfather’s cramped office leafing through one of the trade magazines (Hat’s Off! Hat Life, The Sophisticated Hatter) he kept shelved and in neat piles there, and within whose esteemed pages one found articles on a wide array of stimulating topics.

What’s Wrong with My Hat Displays?
Many stores fail to light their wall cases adequately. Most hat cases have no direct light on the hats; and those which have illumination behind a valance at the top succeed in lighting only the top one or two shelves.

The Art of Fitting Faces
When a man’s ears stick out from the sides of his head the wrong hat makes them even more conspicuous. The crown should be proportioned to the face, but an extreme taper should be avoided, while the brim should be flat-set at the back and sides, and snapped full across the front.

Hats for the Big Fellow
Never sell a big man a hat with a narrow brim and a tapered crown. A narrow brim adds emphasis to a man’s weight and to the width of his face and gives the hat an old-fashioned, stodgy air. A too high crown, on the other hand, makes such a man look like a giant, making his height a liability rather than an asset.

That day, however, my stepfather, who was always dreaming up new ways to enhance his business and increase sales, had another task for me. He had invented a gizmo for calculating hat sizes. While Gilbert sat in his usual chair in the corner near his office, I sat in a leather chair in the middle of the store, from where I had a view through the window with the neon sign, its letters pulsing backwards. Through that window I’d polished I watched cars zip down rainy Main Street, shedding puddles of brake lights. The neon sign bled, too. My stepfather, in his gray suit, coiffured, cuffed and cologned, pipe in mouth, hovered over me.

“Hold your head straight, Leo. Don’t lean forward. Here—” With manicured cool fingers he adjusted my skull. “Perfect.”

“A hot dog,” said Gilbert, in the corner—Gilbert who would have been an ideal test subject for my stepfather’s device had his head not been so unusually large.

“Now,” said my stepfather, “if you’ll just bear with me, I’m going to adjust the three thumbscrews.”

What Color Hat Shall I Sell Him?
Brown hats are best with brown or greenish suits or coats. They rarely look good with gray clothing. Some brown or tan hats may be worn with some blue or blue-gray clothing, but the salesman or the customer must have a real color-sense to be sure of these harmonies.

The instrument (called the “Comformator”, suggesting a mixture of comfort and conformity) despite its soothing, compliant name sat on my head like a crown of thorns. While he made his adjustments I looked out the window. A policeman in a black raincoat direct traffic next to his little wooden kiosk. He wore the equivalent of a clear shower cap over his pointy cap.

“That should do it,” said my stepfather. He crouched to pick up the Polaroid Land Camera that he had put on the carpeted floor nearby. “What I’d like you to do for me now, sport, is I’d like you to hold of the sides of the Comformator, like you’re holding a hat by its brim in a gust of wind, but gently, now. Don’t tug. Okay?”

“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.

How to Sell Quality
First, point out to the customer that in a hat of fine materials and conscientious workmanship the felt is firmer, smoother, springier, and tighter. Next, get the customer’s old hat off his head; this gives you your cue on sizing and price. If it’s a $7.50, show him a $10.00. You can always come down. If he makes no objection, try a $12.50.

“Now hold perfectly still.” He pointed the Polaroid at me. A flashbulb exploded. “Perfect.” He counted to fifteen: one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three . . .meanwhile I kept looking out the window, watching the same police officer pick at his nose between cars. Above his head an ignored traffic signal swung in the wind and rain. Across the way I could see into the drug store, with its dark wooden booths partitioned by beveled glass. The soda fountain was busy, its customers lined up to escape the rain. As I drew an imaginary root beer float up a straw and into my mouth where it exploded in sweetness down to the roots of my teeth, my stepfather peeled the backing away from the developed photograph.

“This is for my patent application,” I heard him say as, in a corner of my vision, his arm shook the Polaroid to dry it further. “To my knowledge, there’s never been a device quite like the Comformator. Okay, Leo, you can let go of the thing now.”

When You Don’t Have It
When the customer asks for something you know you haven’t got, do one of three things: Admit you haven’t the particular article and cheerfully send him elsewhere; admit you have it and try to interest him in something else; say nothing about not having what is called for, but confidently present the hat you know will be best for him.

The customer nearest me at the soda fountain wore a red raincoat. Through layers of glass and rain her features were blurred, but her hair was the unmistakable yellow of day lilies, and I wondered if it might be Jill. I made up my mind that it was.

“The whole secret to using the Comformator,” said my stepfather at his desk while entering figures in a notebook, “is to make sure it’s centered just so. If it’s off-center even by a fraction of an inch, that can throw all your measurements off. That’s important, Leo. It’s also why I’ve built in two ways for checking centeredness, first by equalizing the protrusions of the brim rods, then using the thumbscrews.”

I watched a mother walk her child quickly through the downpour. The child licked a lollipop in the rain. A root beer lollipop, if I had any say in the matter.

Selling Hats to the Hatless
Most people who go hatless have a definite reason for doing so. Many of them can be won back to hat wearing by intelligent arguments, which refute those reasons. For example, if a man says that a hat hurts his head, explain that he probably has an irregularly shaped head and that you have some ovals that should fit him comfortably. To the man who says that air and sunshine are good for the hair, point out that doctors and scalp specialists have stated repeatedly that direct exposure to the sun’s rays dries out the hair’s natural oils, explaining why lifeguards and soldiers the world over have always worn head-covering.

“Another thing to remember is to always sight the protrusions before you take the Conform. Oh, and be sure you’ve got the front underpin centered over the bridge of the nose. Forget that, you might as well throw the whole works out the window.”

A burly man in a yellow slicker, holding its hood over his head, charged across the street against traffic, bouncing like a pinball between stopped cars. The policeman blew his whistle and shot a white palm at him, but the man just kept going.

“Always set the Comformator low. Never set it too high. Better too low than too high.”

Lightweights Make Extra Sales
The time to sell lightweight felts is in the late Spring and early Fall, when neither fall hats nor regular weight felts are selling. Lightweights sell to the eye and the touch. Ruffle it a bit, punch the crown in and out. Then hand it to the customer and let him do it, too. Once a man has handled one and tried it on he is usually sold, even though he realizes that it’s not as sensible or long-wearing a buy as a winter hat.

“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.

I thought of the Project Mercury astronauts and remembered an article I read in Life magazine, how one of the astronauts—it may have been Alan Shepard—said, “The best thing about being in space is looking at the earth, and the next best thing is being weightless.” My mind’s eye flashed the black and white photos that went with the article, of astronauts clowning in their gravity-free space capsules, squirting ribbons of Tang and catching floating peanuts with their mouths. I longed to float free with them, to escape the tyranny of gravity, to get out from under this weight bearing down on my head, to blast through earth’s ponderous atmosphere and drift free and easy among the vacuum-packed stars.

“You know, son,” my stepfather’s voice bubbled its way to me from a great distance of black space, “if we play our cards right this device could very well revolutionize the milliner’s trade. Imagine, Leo, every hat sold in America a perfect fit, not the guesswork of some shoddy salesman at Sears & Roebuck! Think of all the satisfied customers, the repeat sales! Satisfaction, Leo, that’s the key to pulling this business of ours out of its slump! Fashion’s got nothing to do with it.”

How to Shape the Hat
The crease must be centered. For this the bow-tie on the leather is your guide. Note the middle finger in the picture opposite—touching the inside of the hat just above the bow-tie. Never shape a hat against the chest as shown in the next picture, a common habit with inexperienced salesmen, but a bad one. It is almost impossible to center a crease this way, or to judge how deep the crease is being made. In short, it’s the job of a butcher, not an artist.

Six months before it had been new display cases, the ones built by Virgil Zeno. Then it had been fluorescent lighting so men could predict what their hats would look like in office environments, then the wall to wall carpeting, then the flashy neon sign. My stepfather shifted stock, changed his window displays, rearranged furniture, wore different neckties and even a bowtie, switched the part in his hair, slapped different brands of cologne on his cheeks, smoked different flavored tobaccos in his pipe, did everything he could to address the problem of falling sales. With each and every adjustment he would proclaim the problem solved, only to watch helplessly as sales continued their downward trajectory.

Hat Etiquette
There can be no question that wearing a colored, knockabout daytime hat when accompanying a lady in evening dress is decidedly bad manners. Wearing a dinner coat with a derby or a colored daytime hat is as bad manners as wearing unpolished shoes.

“Leo?”

“Hmm?”

“You don’t have to keep still anymore. The Comformator’s not on your head.”

Oh, but it was, it would always be there, on my twelve year-old head, my crown of thorns, my woven chaplet of spiny branches. I felt sorry for Ed Bigelow. And feeling sorry for people is much, much worse than just plain hating them. It made me want to smother Ed Bigelow with one of his hats and put us both out of our misery.

Welcome Visitors From Outer Space

We spent another hour kicking our feet against the cliff and smoking Paps’ cigarettes. Just to have something to talk about I almost mentioned the colored lights I’d seen in the sky, but thought better of it. Victor got hungry and went home. Skunky went to go help his dad build the fallout shelter. Paps had to go feed his father, who had such a bad case of the shakes he couldn’t feed himself. I was hungry, too, but I’d had the foresight to pack two apples in my knapsack, one for me and one for Gilbert.

I decided to walk Gilbert home. Let his own father look after him for a change. We took the short cut down Bum’s Trail, so named for the hoboes that used to camp out there, not in my time, but before, when there’d been more railroad traffic. In winter they’d keep warm and cook on stoves improvised from oil drums, and sleep on junk Pullman and car seats that found their way there, flourishing like odd botanical specimens among the skunk cabbage and horsetail-ferns.

We were halfway down the trail when we came upon an object unlike any I’d ever seen there before. The thing was as big as two furnaces put together, and covered with dials, meters and pipes. The side facing us was rounded, like a giant hubcap, with porthole-like recesses going all the way around, each covered by a piece of thick glass, with nearly all of the pieces broken. The side on the ground seemed flat, though it was hard to tell, since the terrain under it had clearly been stove-in by the impact, pushing the dirt up around it, flattening horsetail ferns that stuck out like the shafts of Gilbert’s stiff hair under his baseball cap. A deep rut of upset earth trailed away from the opposite side, the side not stove-in, like it had been dragged or pushed or forced some other way to its final resting place. I couldn’t guess how it had gotten there, never mind what it was or where it had come from. Then I remembered the colored lights in the sky, the shattered remains of Rufus II, and the blue light that had fallen to earth.

Supposing. . . ? Was this . . . ? Could it be?

There was only one person I knew who might provide an answer, and for him to do so I’d have to bring him some evidence. It would have been better for him to see the whole thing himself, but that was impossible, since he was in a wheelchair.

I got out my Swiss army knife (also in my knapsack) and, on my knees, tried to loosen one of the already loose meters, held in place by rusty pipe and wires. When it wouldn’t come loose I tried another. At last, after sawing away at it with the pathetic little hacksaw the Swiss army had seen fit to include in my knife I got one of the meter’s off and slipped it into my bag. While in there I took out both apples and offered Gilbert one, then withdrew it, making him promise that he wouldn’t say a word or, since words weren’t exactly his medium, indicate to anyone by any means what we had seen. He nodded. I gave him the apple.

Using weeds, mulch and sticks I camouflaged the thing as best I could. Gilbert watched and I gave him the thumbs-up, which always made him giddy. “Okay?” I said and he nodded, like he always did when I said “Okay?” I put a finger to my lips, sealing our secret. With a pat on the back, eating my apple, I lead us back into town.

* * *

Virgil Zeno’s carpentry shack was by the railroad tracks, halfway between the grain and feed store and the lumberyard. On his rooftop Virgil had erected a cross, big enough to see from the top of Cheese Hill and beyond, painted white and fringed with 100-watt floodlight bulbs, so at night it glowed like one of those phosphorescent fish that prowl the deepest oceans. Next to the cross there was a wooden sign, itself as big as a freight car, red letters on a white backdrop:

WELCOME VISITORS FROM OUTER SPACE

In the event that the visitors did not happen to understand or speak English, the greeting had been translated into Latin:

AVE HOSPES, ARCANO AB COELO DESCENDENS

Unless half-blind (like Gilbert), you could easily read the sign from the top of Cheese Hill, that’s how big it was. I guess it had to be big for visitors from outer space to pay any attention to it.

The carpentry shed itself was painted battleship gray. You couldn’t see much through the windows, they were always so thick with sawdust. But through the coating I could see the dim glow of lights burning inside, so I knew Virgil was there (I’d have known anyway, since he worked every day—Sundays, too). When not turning legs for tables and chairs on his lathe or milling dovetail joints for someone’s bookcase, he was in his back room building a flying saucer out of wood. No one was supposed to know he was building it, but we did, every kid in Bowler knew it, Virgil having taken us, one by one with a wink into his confidence and shown the thing to us, lifting up a sawdust-coated drop-cloth to offer us a tantalizing glimpse of smooth, rounded, dovetailed wood.

“Elderberry,” Virgil had pointed out while offering me my own private glimpse. “Dense but lightweight and flexible, steams easily. They used to make cradles and arrow shafts with it. Makes sense, right? A cradle for support, an arrow for thrust. Stuff makes a good clapper stick for percussion instruments, too.”

Since 1954, when Virgil Zeno sighted his first UFO in the skies above Bowler, he’d been the town’s unofficial flying saucer expert. Some people, including my stepfather—who considered Virgil a “nut case”—didn’t see the need for such an authority. But most were glad to give Virgil his due, first because he made them laugh—as “nut cases” go, he was an amusing nut job. And he was a good cabinetmaker. That no one, not even my stepfather who commissioned him to design and build display cabinets for his hat store, could dispute.

But there was a bigger reason for the town’s indulgence, namely the accident that had claimed the lives of Vito and Verso, Virgil’s identical brothers (they had been triplets) on April 5, 1953, Easter Sunday, their birthday. The three brothers were taking their maiden voyage down Main Street in a brand new, two-toned, green and white DeSoto Firedome convertible coupe they’d bought for themselves, with Verso at the wheel. My father, who had been there to witness it, assured me that the spectacle of the Zeno triplets parading down Main Street in their gleaming new purchase would have made a lasting impression on all those who saw it even without the added, indelible seal of tragedy. As the DeSoto approached the railroad crossing the signals started to flash and clang. Verso tried to get over the tracks before the striped arms came down. He got past the first arm. But then the second one, the one on the other side, came down, blocking his way. Eyewitnesses said that instead of crashing through it, he put the DeSoto in reverse and tried to back out.

What happened next is still unclear. Either the DeSoto stalled or one of its four spanking whitewalls got caught in the grating or both. One witness saw smoke spinning out from one of the tires. Chad Nelson, owner of Nelson’s Hardware, heard the car’s engine turning over. Meanwhile the three brothers sat there, Verso still behind the wheel, Vito beside him in the passenger seat, Virgil in the back, all three of them wearing their freshly laundered white carpenter’s overalls. According to Mr. Nelson, they seemed not the least bit perturbed, but to be having a quiet debate in the car as the locomotive whistle sounded louder and louder, lengthening and thinning out in its approach, like a long, wide rubber band being stretched. A freight train, headed for Danville (freights were especially dangerous; they sped through the town and no one ever knew when they were coming). The Zeno brothers were still in their seats, still calmly talking things over when the train picked up the DeSoto and carried it, like a cat carrying its kitten, two hundred feet before depositing it in a crumpled heap at the base of one of the Cavanaugh Fuel Oil storage tanks. According to the headline story in the next day’s Bowler News Times Vito and Verso were both killed instantly. Virgil alone survived, thrown free of both car and locomotive by the impact, landing feet first in a stack of peat moss bags in the grain and feed store lot, his legs both crushed.

“It’s always tragic when people ignore the crossing guards,” Chief of Police Warren Owens was quoted as saying. “It always ends up that the train wins.”

* * *

I heard the rotary saw screaming inside and waited for it to stop before knocking. The piney smell of cut wood greeted us as the door opened and Virgil sat there, his white coveralls golden with sawdust. Though confined to a wheelchair since the accident, he looked tall and gangly as ever, the knees of his long, ruined legs spread wide and poking up into the air. He raised his visor, revealing a face proportionally as long as the rest of him, with a lantern jaw and a sharp nose and eyes set deep into his skull. He smiled. His teeth were long, too, as long and yellow as his sawdusty coveralls.

“What’s up, boys?”

I took the satchel off my back, opened it and pulled out the meter. I handed it to him. Virgil studied it, turning it over in his big, sawdusty hand, its knuckles puffed-up like the knots in old trees. He looked up at me.

“Where did you find this?”

“On Bum’s Trail.” I described the object from which it had been removed, down to its smallest particulars.

“Did anyone else see it?”

“Just me. And him.” With my thumb I pointed to Gilbert.

“And no one followed you here?” he said, glancing furtively up and down the railroad tracks.

“Not as far as I know.”

“You’d better step inside.”

Virgil closed the door behind us and we followed him in his wheelchair, its wheels and our sneakers leaving sawdust prints on the dark, linoleum-tiled floor. Everything in Virgil’s shop was coated with a fine layer of sawdust: floor, tables, benches, tools and saws, shelves, windowsills. The workbenches and saws were all wheelchair height. He escorted us into his private room and closed the door. In his back room, that’s where Virgil told us all his flying saucer stories.

I should state here and now that Virgil and I had an understanding. He would tell me unbelievable things, and I would believe them, or pretend to. And though I suspect that he had a similar arrangement with other boys in Bowler, I have no way of knowing, since whatever Virgil told you he told you in the strictest confidence, and had you swear on whatever meant the most to you (I chose my dead father’s grave) not to repeat it to anyone. This arrangement was reciprocal. If I told Virgil something unbelievable, I could count on him to believe it. Today psychologists, who have terms for everything, have one for such arrangements: they call it mutual enabling.

The walls of Virgil Zeno’s back room were plastered with snapshots and other documentary evidence of flying saucers sent to him by enthusiasts all over the country, along with a chart on which he registered the details of his various sightings. He kept a two-burner stove there. He lit one of the burners and put a kettle on for hot chocolate. No matter the season, Virgil always offered hot chocolate to his visitors, even on muggy summer days. And I always drank the stuff. To refuse would have breached protocol. He kept a bag of marshmallows next to the stove, and plopped one in each mug along with a dash of unintentional, nutmeg-like sawdust. To this day the taste of hot chocolate carries me back to Virgil’s back room, and to his confidential voice filling me in on the secrets of electro-magnetic propulsion, ionized air, ‘G’ forces and coronas of bluish flame, and telling me—for the millionth time—about his first UFO sighting, on Easter Sunday, 1954, exactly one year after the accident that killed his identical brothers.

For his fortieth birthday the townspeople had all chipped in and bought Virgil another DeSoto similar to the one obliterated in the accident, a pink and white Fireflight, with a hand-operated throttle and brakes installed so he could drive it without legs. That evening, after the festivities had been concluded, Virgil drove alone up to the high school, a half-mile from town, parked near the football field and sat looking up at the sky, testing his knowledge of the constellations. Until that night, he had never shown any special interest in the stars, had rarely bothered to look up at them. Now, though, for some reason they captivated him. He sat there for hours.

Some time around midnight, a shooting star zipped across the sky. For the next three hours an endless supply of shooting stars slid through the atmosphere. At around four o’clock Virgil saw what he would later describe to reporters as “a circle of alternating lights of various pale colors revolving around a central bright disk of light hovering in the northwestern sky, about a quarter-mile above the earth’s surface.” Though he could only guess at the object’s position, he was fairly certain that it hovered above the ruins of the Cavanaugh Hat Factory, at the town’s western edge. The object hovered for “no fewer than five minutes”—so Virgil estimated, having switched the lights of the DeSoto off so he couldn’t read the clock dial on the dashboard. The colored lights (Virgil noted in his diary later that same morning) rotated in a clockwise direction, their colors shifting as they rotated, creating the same sort of stroboscopic illusion that one sees often in cowboy movies, where the wheels of a moving stagecoach appear to be stationary.

“The object,” Virgil’s report continues, “showed a sharp and firm regular outline, namely one of smooth, elliptical character that appeared harder and sharper than the edges of the surrounding hills or of any possible cloud formations. The hue of the luminous object was somewhat less white than the light of Jupiter in the dark sky, not aluminum or silver colored, or like any bright metal, but of a glowing mineral phosphorescence more like mother of pearl, or mica. In hovering the object exhibited some wobbly motion, which further served to set off the object as a rigid if not a solid body. After approximately ninety seconds in plain view the ellipsoid moved slowly behind what I believe must have been a cloud (273º azimuth, elevation app. 1º) and I assumed that I had lost it. But a few seconds later it reappeared in a slightly different location (275º azimuth, elevation 1.5º). Having reappeared, the object resumed its hovering pattern, this time rising slowly across the face of some patchy clouds against which the impression of luminosity was enhanced. This subtle yet clearly discernible shift in position convinced me that I had borne witness to a novel airborne event.”

Virgil’s notes were published verbatim in the Bowler News Times under the headline, “BOWLER RESIDENT SITES UFO.” My stepfather believed that the only reason Burt Lansing, the paper’s editor, published Virgil’s “drivel” was because he felt sorry for Virgil. But he also felt that it was a bad idea, since all it had done was “feed a poor, demented man’s delusions.”

* * *

“I take it,” said Virgil, handing me my hot chocolate, “that you saw those lights in the sky last night?”

“You saw them, too?”

Virgil indicated that I should have a seat. Since the flying saucer took up most of Virgil’s back room, there was nowhere for me to sit except on it, which I did. It made a surprisingly comfortable chair.

With me sitting Virgil said, “Let’s cut right to the chase, why don’t we?” He put his elbows on his knees and his fists together and rested his long jaw on them. “Sometime between now and the end of summer you are going to make contact with a visitor from outer space.” He stared at me, his dark gray pupils swimming in bloodshot whites.

“How do you know?”

“This object that you’ve brought proves it,” he said, hefting it. “All morning I’ve been waiting for just such a sign.”

Now, Virgil and I both knew perfectly well that the object I had brought to him, the meter, was just that, a meter, and nothing more. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the “flying saucer” I had discovered was anything but a flying saucer. It was a factory boiler, a chunk of locomotive engine, a hat factory component, part of some failed prototype weapon or instrument contracted by the military and created by one of the many companies in our area that had sprung up over the past decade and that relied increasingly on government contracts for survival. As for how and why had it been dumped on Bum’s Trail—who knew? Maybe it flew off of a speeding train; maybe it fell from a helicopter. Maybe a truck dumped it there. It made no difference, its genesis having become as irrelevant as its fresh purpose was symbolic. It was meant to make believers out of us.

“Why me?” I asked.

“I have no idea.” Virgil smiled. “But there must be a reason.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

Virgil shook his head. “Nothing. What can you do? Keep your eyes open. Be aware. And above all realize that whatever form this visiting entity assumes it’s not likely to be one that you’ll immediately perceive as alien. It won’t be some little green man, Leo. Odds are he or she will blend in neatly with the surroundings, the better to escape notice. They could even pretend to be someone you know. Which is why you’ll need to be especially vigilant.”

“How will I know when it happens?”

“That’s just it, you won’t,” said Virgil. “Not unless you open that third eye of yours, the one that sees things without seeing them, the one in the middle of your head. This one right here.” Virgil twisted his sawdusty thumb playfully into the middle of my forehead. “The all-seeing third eye.”

“Does everyone have a third eye?” I asked, sipping sawdusty hot chocolate.

“Yes,” said Virgil. “Everyone does. But in most people it’s sealed permanently shut. For all we know yours is sealed shut, too. I guess we’ll know one way or another by the end of summer.”

The Man in Blue

Something blue entered my field of vision: a man walking. In itself this might not have been so unusual, except that in Bowler no one walked, no one of driving age who was not impaired, incompetent or otherwise deranged or demented. To be a grown up and walk was to be an object of infinite conjecture especially among us Back Shop Boys.

A case in point: Frank Hopper, better known to us as “Hoppy.” We called him that because of how he walked, bird-like, with quick mincing, steps, his chinless head thrust pigeon-style out in front of him (that his last name matched his walk was a coincidence). He walked to the supermarket and back, arms wrapped around twin grocery bags, eyes darting clandestinely back and forth. He wore the same dust-colored clothes every day, faded green worker’s pants, beat-up leather bombardier jacket, dirty sneakers and a dusty fedora with a wrinkled brim (and that he wore with no crease or pinch and pulled down over his ears in a way that would have outraged my hat-worshipping stepfather). On the evidence of these qualities we concluded that Hoppy was a homo who performed indecent acts on kids that he would lure into his shack on Durant Lane, a dead end. Not only was Hoppy a homo, he was the quintessence of homosexuality. Of this we were as sure as we were that the earth was round and Communists had hooves, horns and pointy red tails. Had their been a picture next to that word in the dictionary, it would have borne Frank Hopper’s likeness.

Though he used a cane and walked with a limp the Man in Blue’s walk was nothing like Hoppy’s. There was nothing bird-like or mincing about it. He took fast, long, determined strides, as if fighting against some urge that held him back, or tried to. I watch him cross the parking lot, seeing nothing but his back, until the buildings of Main Street hid him from view.

Just then the others arrived, walking their bikes. Rudimentary greetings were exchanged. How’s it hanging? Long and lean or low and lazy? Can you throw it over your shoulder like a continental soldier? Does it wobble to and fro or do you tie it in a bow? Short, shriveled and always to the left or straight down the middle?

“Did you see him?” said Skunky, parking his red Schwinn Typhoon against a tree. Summer hadn’t even started, officially, and already the sun had done a job on the tip of his freckled nose. He got out a pack of cigarettes, lit one and passed it around.

“Who?” I said.

“The blue guy,” said Paps.

“You had to see him. How could you not see him?”

“He just crossed the parking lot five seconds ago.”

“So did you see him or didn’t you?”

“I’m not sure. What did he look like?”

They described him. Blue suit. Beard. Cane. Limp.

“Hmm,” I said. “I’m really not sure.”

“How could you not be sure?”

“He was too busy looking through these things.” Paps grabbed the binoculars from around my neck and then dropped them.

“You should try using your own eyes once in a while,” said Skunky.

“Yeah, you’d be surprised how well those two round shiny balls in the front of your head work,” said Victor.

“Only first he’s got to get his head out of his ass,” said Paps.

“Sounds to me like a major operation,” said Skunky.

“A headupyourassectomy, it’s called, I believe,” Paps said.

I flipped them all my fractional middle finger.

Following which the speculations began.

A beatnik.

A homo.

An ex-con.

A lunatic.

A communist.

A spy.

A Commie spy.

“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.

* * *

From the Man in Blue conversation turned to nuclear annihilation, a popular subject in those duck-and-cover days. Just the week before, on May 6, 1962, three weeks after John Glenn’s singed Mercury capsule sizzled into the cool Pacific like a drop of hot oil in water, Bowler and neighboring Danville had staged a mock nuclear attack. “Theoretical Bomb Destroys Bowler,” the headline in the local paper read, with the article accompanying it describing the imaginary havoc wreaked by a hypothetical H-bomb carrying the equivalent of 60,000 tons of TNT set off at the intersection of Route 202 and Main Street. In addition to both towns’ shopping districts being “completely obliterated,” the article reported, all local hospitals, radio stations, newspapers and Civil Defense headquarters were destroyed. Streets were rendered impassable, utilities knocked out, and everyone caught in the immediate vicinity of the impact was incinerated. The article didn’t say who might attack us, but we all knew it would be those bastard Russians.

The front page photograph in the Bowler News Times showed two elementary school children sitting under a trestle table in the school hallway, peeking over folded arms, with their teacher, Mr. Craig (my 5th grade teacher), showing them the proper procedure. Inside were more photos showing school children participating in “Duck & Cover Day,” with groups being lead down into a fallout shelter as part of their Civil Defense Drill, the three basic steps of which were as follows:

1. Remain calm.

2. Proceed to the nearest fallout shelter in an orderly fashion.

3. If you can’t get to a shelter, sit under your desk or in the hallway with your legs pulled toward your chest and your head on your knees and cover the back of your neck to guard against “A-bomb flash.”

To these simple steps Paps had added one more:

4. Kiss your ass goodbye.

Mr. White, Skunky’s father, had taken President Kennedy’s advice and, based on plans in the latest issue of Popular Mechanics, had started building a shelter in their back yard. Mr. White’s next door neighbor, Mr. Lubdell, inspired him. One evening a few weeks earlier, while Walter White was watering the front garden, he noticed Mr. Lubdell, who’d just finished building his fallout shelter, standing in his front yard looking up at the starry sky. He had a rifle. He said good evening to Skunky’s father, then began talking in a strangely quiet voice, explaining how a bomb shelter is designed to provide the requisite amount of filtered air, bottled water, and emergency food for one family and one family only. “So,” Mr. Lubdell said, “however unpleasant it may be, a man must be firm: when the bombs fall, he’ll hustle his family down there and close the door on the rest of the world. The goddamn dog’s staying up top, and the neighbors, too, including you and your family, Walt. No hard feelings. It’s just that there’s no extra room. You let extras in and we’re all going to die.” So saying, Mr. Lubdell shouldered the rifle, took aim at a distant star, and fired. “Dead, god damn it.”

“So now dad’s building our own shelter and screw Mr. Lubdell!” said Skunky.

“Keeping up with the Joneses,” said Victor.

“Keeping up with the jerks is more like it,” said Paps.

“My dad’s building us one, too,” said Victor the liar. “It’s gonna be three floors, with hot and cold running water, air conditioning, and a heated pool.” He drank water from an aluminum Boy Scout canteen. His belly jiggled as he gulped. “He’s building it under the garage where no one can see it.” This was the same garage that, according to Victor, once housed a mint condition Stanley Steamer and currently sheltered his father’s XK-E Jaguar, which likewise none of us had ever seen.

“Guess he’ll have to interrupt building that replica of the Hanging Hardens of Babylon, huh, Vic?” Paps said.

“No kidding," said Victor. "I mean there's no point having a beautiful garden if your whole family is gonna be dead, not much of one, anyway. Is there?”

“He's got you there, Paps,” said Skunky, spitting through the gap in his front teeth. Of us all Skunky was the best spitter. The gap gave him superior range and accuracy.

“A hot dog,” said Gilbert.

Paps wasn’t alone in his pessimism. None of us, not even Skunky with his faith in fallout shelters, considered duck & cover to be anything but the shining emblem of adult mendacity. We had seen enough doomsday movies (On the Beach, The Day the World Ended, Atomic Kid) and Twilight Zone episodes to know it would take more than a desk to save us from all that fallout. Among popular topics of debate wasn’t if or when we’d die, but how. We revisited that debate now, with Skunky saying that death would be “instantaneous.” Paps begged to differ, claiming we’d die slowly, from our internal organs out, that our guts would liquefy, and that we’d know the end was near when we started pissing or puking out lungs, kidneys, and intestines. According to Victor death would come even more slowly, a penetrating sunburn that would deep fry us up “like a bucket of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky fried chicken wings” (count on fat Victor to dish up a culinary metaphor). I—who had looked into the matter—said if we were lucky we might live a month or two before our skin and hair started falling off in clumps and blisters bubbled up in our lungs and on the walls of our stomachs.

We were deep into our debate when Victor tapped my shoulder.

“Look, man! He’s coming back this way!”

I looked down and saw him again: the Man in Blue, limping across the bicycle saddle factory parking lot, approaching the cliff this time, carrying a shopping bag, not the way Hoppy did but with one arm around it like a fireman rescuing a child.

Skunky broke off a chunk of limestone and hurled it. The cheese bomb arced in the air and came down on the pavement a few inches in front of the tip of the man’s cane, where it smashed to powdery bits that scattered across the parking lot.

The Man in Blue stopped walking and looked up at us. We waited for him to shout something or shake his fist like the old guard. He didn’t. He didn’t even smile or frown. He kept looking up at us, his mouth a straight line under his beard.

Then he kept walking.