Goodbye, Candlestick

I'm writing this as the 49ers take the field to play what will most likely be their last game ever at Candlestick Park, where they've played football since 1971, where the Giants played baseball from 1960 through 1999. And I'm starting to miss it.
       Well, I'm not really missing it. It's a horrible stadium. Grim, bleak, ugly. Hard to get to. No matter where you sit, you're too far from the field. Cold, wet, and windy all summer long. The wind used to screw up baseball games and the boggy field mucked up football games. Not enough restrooms, terrible food. The Giants almost moved to Florida just to get away from the place, and it took a new stadium to keep them in town. The 49ers have been pushing for a new stadium for twenty years, and now they're finally getting one—but not in San Francisco.
       And it's not like the 49ers playing 50 miles further away makes any difference to me. I haven't gone to Candlestick in fifteen years and I haven't felt much desire to. Frankly, I'm more likely to want to spend the time and money to check out the team's spiffy new home in Santa Clara than I ever would have been to go back to Candlestick. 
       I do have some memories around the place. In the first half of the '80s, when I was fairly new in S.F., working part time, with some baseball-crazy friends, I became a passionate Giants fan and spent a lot of chilly days and frigid nights in the bleachers. It was a pretty forgettable team I was following—Jeff Leonard, Chili Davis, Bill Laskey—but the ritual was fun. My time got shorter after that, but I still managed to get to several Giants games over the next few years, when they were actually good. I was there for an All-Star Game and one playoff; I still remember Joe Price pitching great innings of long relief and Jose Uribe putting the Giants ahead with a clutch single down the line.

       Football games were a bigger deal. I took my brother a few times, my father once, with a sense of doing something meaningful, a sort of offering to the family cult of 49ers fandom. They all had happy endings except one, one that that was by far, to my mind, the unhappiest 49er game of all: their 15-13 loss to New York in the NFC Championship after the 1990 season, when they fumbled away a trip to their third Super Bowl in a row and Joe Montana broke his hand. Miserable as it was, I still take a certain pride in having been there that day. (If nothing else, it was a chance to watch 68,000 people vacate a building so quickly it was as if a gale had blown us all away.)
       And, of course, there are the memories of the things that happened there, that I watched on TV but will always associate with the place. I remember how alive I felt, how electric everything seemed to be, after that Dallas game in January, 1982. I remember the glow I felt for days, even though my real life was pretty crappy at the time, after they beat the Bears to reach their second Super Bowl. I remember the pizza-and-TV parties Jennie and I would throw for every playoff game, baseball and football both. I remember my friend Joe coming up from San Diego to watch Will Clark put the Giants in the World Series with an eighth-inning single up the middle. And even though the teams will continue to play inside my television set the way they always have, knowing that the place is different—that I'll never again see those shots of the Goodyear blimp over San Francisco Bay on an autumn afternoon—is a loss of some kind.
      None of that is what I'm really missing, though. As I've been writing this, I've realized that I'm mourning something that isn't the place and it isn't even the memories. What I'm missing is just how much it all used to matter to me. 

       I started to pull away from baseball sometime in the early '90s. I had a baby son, I had a lot of interesting work to do (and a lot of deadlines), and it just became impossible to follow a team for 162 games a year. I got in the habit of tuning in for pennant races and playoffs but not really engaging with the rest of the year, and inevitably the passion faded. I still follow the 49ers, but they stay in a much smaller compartment in my heart. After Nicky was old enough to go out and do things, I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoons with my family, and so I start watching football games on my VCR. Gradually I started fast-forwarding through more and more plays. Then the players I'd been so in love with started moving on, and I just didn't connect as well with the new ones. I still watch most 49er games, but fast-forwarding; I still arrange either to host or visit friends for playoffs, but I spend more time sitting and talking and eating, and less time standing and pacing and staring and screaming and jumping and dropping to my knees.
      Which is healthy, really. After the last Super Bowl I felt downhearted for about fifteen minutes, and I thought ruefully about that final, dreadful set of downs at the goal line maybe a dozen times during the next few days. In decades past, I would be depressed about a playoff loss for weeks. I would wake up thinking about that Roger Craig fumble or go to bed writhing over that ball Candy Maldonado lost in the lights. All over games that didn't really affect anything, played by a bunch of guys who didn't know I existed. 
       Of course, that coin had another side. There was an ecstasy, a feeling of everything being right with the world, that that same bunch of guys could give me with a victory, and it could last for days, for weeks. I enjoy watching Colin Kaepernick and Vernon Davis and Justin Smith, and sometimes they even make me vocalize suddenly and loudly, but I don't feel that exquisite, world-transforming joy I used to. No matter what happens in the end zone at Candlestick Park, I remain solidly, happily, healthily in my real life.
       I would never want the whole emotional package of sports mania back again, with all the lost time, the vast brain space given to statistics, the pointless funks. But I do miss that ecstasy, a little bit. And even that strangely sweet agony that made the ecstasy possible. I miss the feeling I used to be able to get driving past Candlestick on Highway 101, even on a Tuesday in February, long past the Super Bowl and well before Opening Day, when the stadium just sat there slumbering, ugly as hell—a feeling almost as if I were passing some boyhood home, all longing and joy and almost painfully rich memory. I'll miss that, at least a little, when I drive past the place next time and know that its life as a stadium is over. And I'll miss it when I drive by, sometime in the next year or two, and realize that it's gone.
       For now, though, it's still here, and Frank Gore just ground out ten yards on the spongy turf, and I'm going to watch it.
    


       

Village, Pueblo, Dorf

I was sitting and reading at Martha & Bros, a just-under-the-radar San Francisco institution, a handful of coffee shops (exactly five), entirely as family owned as the name suggests. Martha is from Central America—Nicaragua, I think—and she staffs her shops mainly with a seemingly endless supply of nieces, friends of nieces, and cousins of friends of nieces from the old country. The walls are painted with murals of hillside plantations with macaws in the trees, the back-counter gossip is in Spanish. Sometimes the music is Latin too, although just as often it's unobtrusive coffee-joint music, "smooth jazz" or soul/pop or grown-up rock.

      Today it was a variant of the last, Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz and people like them whose names I don't know. It's a common sound in S.F. cafes, one I tune out easily. The only note that nearly caught my attention was an announcer's voice—this wasn't the usual Pandora but apparently a radio station, probably KFOG, which every white person in the Bay Area between 30 and 60 seems to listen to while driving to work. It's harder for me to tune out speech than music, especially caffeined-up rock-FM speech, so it kept forcing its way through my book and into my consciousness. But even as it forced itself, I never fully understood what was being said. Gradually, in fact, that's what brought me to full awareness: the refusal of the words ever to coalescence into any sort of sense. 
       Which is when I paused and listened and realized there were some words I knew, just not words I'd been looking for. Jetzt. Ihre. Neue. Fünf. The radio was speaking German. And as I listened longer, I discovered that about every third song, although its sound was never incongruous with the rest, was in German too.
       The explanation wasn't difficult to imagine. An employee chooses a station off some selection of streaming music options (iTunes used to offer this, someone must still) and either doesn't bother to read too closely or doesn't know enough non-Spanish to pick out the nuances of Rock Radio Hitwelle. Even so, it struck me as a little bit miraculous.
       This is globalization, certainly, but not how we would think of it if we heard an American station in Managua, or even in Berlin, where guilty worries about cultural colonialism would start creeping up. Yes, it was American music, but looped back to us and varied subtly by another nation—not a downtrodden nation by any means, but not one with any imperial authority in the arts or popular culture. After all, Germany failed in its last effort to impose its culture on the rest of us, to have us listening to Wagner and watching movies about bright-eyed young goatherds in the Alps. Failed quite badly, actually. Its musical intrusion into a Nicaraguan-American coffee shop was not only not fraught with significance but was quite wonderfully, randomly insignificant.
       The online version of that German station no doubt exists mainly for Landsmänner sent far from home and missing not only their home-cooked culture but their familiar, everyday reworking of American culture: the tired department manager at the Volkswagen plant in Puebla, the sweaty staff at the Deutsches Generalkonsulat in Lagos. But because the internet is the internet, it leaks out. It finds the wormhole through space and appears, uncomprehended, barely noticed, but welcome and amusing and vouching momentarily for the bigness and strangeness of things, in California, in Nicaragua, in anywhere.


      

Beaver Papers: The Sequel

So it's turning out to be simply too big a job to pull together an "expanded edition" for The Beaver Papers' 30th anniversary ebook reissue, as we were originally planning. Just proofing the original and doing the whole ebook-format learning curve is going to make it hard enough just to bring the original bookout next month as planned. Given that, we've decided that the 30th Anniversary Edition will consist only of the original book, with two new scripts, a new introduction, and some corrections of fact (or what passes for "fact" in the reality of The Beaver Papers), sold for a lower-than-planned $2.99.

      Which means we'll be saving the unpublished scripts we were gathering for the "expanded" edition—and coming up with a whole bunch more—for The Beaver Papers 2. Thirty years ago, when The Beaver Papers was new and doing well in the stores, we talked about writing a sequel...but life moved on and we never got to it. Now, almost by accident, we're finally doing it. 

       So far we know it'll include faux Leave It to Beaver script treatments by Ayn Rand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, W. Somerset Maugham, J. G. Ballard, John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges, and at least 15 others. Along with the story of what happened during "the Autumn of the Beaver," when the cast and crew fought to bring the show back to life after the heart-rending cancellation described at the end of the original book. It should be out in less than a year.
       Oh, and there will be a sneak preview of two of the scripts from the sequel in the Anniversary Edition next month: Beaver in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Do Beavers Dreams of Electric Creeps? by Philip K. Dick. That'll give you a chance to see if we've gotten better or worse at this parody thing in the past three decades.

       Better or worse, we've had a great time going back to that long-ago idea and bringing it back to life for our current selves. I really wasn't sure we'd have it in us when we started, but whatever drove us to write the thing in the first place is apparently still alive in us. I guess sometimes you can go home again.

        (Actually, that's someone we haven't parodied yet: Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Beaver?)

Technology Addiction

I've been asked to deliver a keynote address at the International Congress on Technology Addiction in Istanbul in a few weeks. I didn't hesitate to accept. I've been to Istanbul twice, and both times wanted to get back as quickly as I could. The last time was over twenty years ago, so this was a very welcome invitation. It was an unexpected invitation, too...because I've never written or spoken publicly on addiction of any kind. But I've been wanting to, wondering if I was ready and what a good entree would be. And suddenly, out of the blue, comes this email from a group I've never heard of asking me to speak.
       I'm assuming the reason I was on their list of desirable speakers is that I've written and spoken a fair amount about video games. My topic, though, has always been their content, especially violent fantasy, growing out of that book I wrote called Killing Monsters. I've fielded a few questions about game addiction during the Q&A period of talks and during press interviews, but it's never been my focus. Not my professional focus, I mean. Because privately I've thought a lot about it. Mainly because I struggle with the damned thing myself.
       It's not games with me. I don't play video games unless there's some compelling research reason, and I've gotten good at avoiding such reasons. But Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Google News, Blogger...at one time or another I've had to set strict rules and bring in a support network to stay off every damned one of them. Which is part of a larger complex of addictive, obsessive, compulsive, habitual, and God knows what else behaviors I've been wrestling with and exploring and slowly coming to understand for a long time.
       I've had a feeling for a while now that I have in me a good book about addiction and recovery. But I haven't known how even to start thinking about it. Now this conference in Istanbul is forcing me to pull at least some of my thoughts and knowledge together and to bring them to other people. I'm expecting it to open the door to more—and I don't mean to more invitations, although that could happen. I mean it'll open some doors in my head.
        Something people in spiritual recovery programs talk about are "higher power moments." A lot of people see signs in the events around them from the universe or God or some other guiding power. I've always figured signs were where we wanted to find them. The universe is constantly throwing unexpected twists at us, and if, deep down, we want to read one as pointing us in the right direction, then we'll do that. If we're not inclined to see it as a sign, then we probably won't. 
       This invitation out of nowhere definitely has "God moment" written all over it. Which is how I choose to take it. I've wanted to open the door to writing and talking publicly about addiction and recovery, but I've been uncertain about how and timid about whether I should. I'm choosing to take this as a sign from the universe that it's time to plunge in. Where it takes me from there, I'll find out when I get there. 

Into E-Publishing

So after years of watching this whole “electronic publishing” thing develop and wondering if it might be good for me as a writer, I’m finally plunging in. Will Jacobs and I are hard at work on the “Expanded 30th Anniversary Edition” of our first book, The Beaver Papers.

       The publisher is Atomic Drop Press. They’re a very new outfit—they’ve only brought one book out before, a peculiar thing called The Max Kleinman Reader—but they’ve got a snazzy look and a lot of ambition. They’ve gotten themselves onto Amazon and a nearly every other e-book vendor by way of Smashwords, and they’ll be adding print-on-demand soon. And they’ve promised us that after Beaver they’ll want to work with us on more: probably bringing back our comic book The Trouble with Girls and launching at least one new project.
       I know I’ve described the conceit of the book before: what if the world’s great writers had written episodes of Leave It to Beaver? With summaries of episodes of the most wholesome of old-style sitcoms as if written by William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and twenty other people. We’ll be adding at least ten more scripts to this one, probably more. So far we definitely have Philip Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, J. G. Ballard, Flannery O’Connor, and the US Office of Civil Defense. That last one is called “Duck and Cleaver.”
       It’s been strange and fun to go back to something I did 32 years ago and do more in the same vein. The gulf from one’s early 20s to one’s mid 50s can seem huge, but I've been astonished at how quickly that gulf can be leaped back over. Apparently that goofy, know-nothing, 23-year old is still very much alive in me, for good or ill. Which I’m glad of. He was an idiot in a lot of ways, but he had an energy and optimism and willingness to throw himself into something just because it excited him that I’m glad I haven’t lost. When this job’s done I’ll be curious to see, not only how the new scripts stack up to the old, but how this unexpected loop-back through my past his affected my current work. (Because I’m pretty sure it will, somehow or other.)
       It’s also been strange and fun to discover a whole new way of getting books to an audience. Where it will lead me or whether it will make me any money almost doesn't matter now. I’ve been doing the published-on-paper-by-a-big company-in-New-York thing for more than half my life, so I like learning what else the word “book” can mean. If nothing else, this e-publishing thing is fast: Will and I are still writing new material in September, but we still expect to get the book out before 2013 ends and it becomes a 31st Anniversary Edition.
       I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.

The Beaver of Wrath

Today is almost exactly, as well as I can remember, the 30th anniversary of the day my first published book appeared in bookstores. 
       Will Jacobs and I wrote The Summer of the Beaver in a six-week fever from the end of May to the beginning of July, 1981. He was twenty-six, I was not quite twenty-four. Things change fast when you're young; at the start of those six weeks we were just tossing off parodies to make each other laugh, at the end of it we were revising a book with editors in mind and strategizing how to pitch it to them. 
       I think we kind of knew that this was the first publishable thing either of us had written, but we weren't about to give up on our vain dreams of selling novels that quickly...and so we ended up birthing a monster of a query letter in which we pitched nine (yes, nine) books at once. A few years ago I read that letter out loud at a Writers Grotto event called Regretature, to the great amusement of people who were not only older and wiser but would have been smart enough not to do anything like that even in their twenties. Here's the video. 
       We sent off over 100 of those letters, and with them caught the interest of one one agent, Martha Millard, and one editor, Peter Cannon at Crown Publishing. We weren't surprised, deep down, when they both asked to see only the Beaver book.
      We were worried that a genuine, professional, New York editor would insist on messing with our idiosyncratic inventions—like asking us to substitute better-known authors for personal fascinations like William Saroyan and Alain Robbe-Grillet—but we had nothing to fear. Peter was a new editor, no older or wiser than we were, and he loved the book's peculiarity as much as we did. The 25 parodies and the bizarre historical narrative that holds them together saw print almost exactly as we'd written them, except that Peter (wisely) made us ditch the absurd first-person narrator we'd created, Starchy McGregor, a supposed stunt double for Jerry Mathers. He then made us cut (to our momentary horror but ultimate agreement) a ton of absurd narrative from the end of the book, including our synopsis for a politically-charged movie called Beaver Now. And he suggested a better title: The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season.
       A writer had to wait a long, long time in those pre-computerized days of publishing for his book to come out. We did our revisions through the summer of 1982 and publication was scheduled for a year later. But finally the day came when our beloved publicist, Sally Berk, called to tell us that our book was on the counter of a real bookstore in New York City. From that day on, although nothing quite went the way I'd fantasized it, nothing was quite the same either. 
       Let's pick up where we left off last time, with the fall-out from the arrival of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Beaver at the Leave It to Beaver production offices...
 

May 5-10, 1963

Mosher and Connelly were frankly perplexed by this submission. Although horrified at Kerouac's new interpretation of Eddie and Wally's morality, they were nonetheless flattered that such a literary giant would contribute to their show. Having nothing to lose, they presented the script to ABC executives. While they did not recognize Kerouac's name, the executives did seem tentatively interested in this new direction.

       Mosher and Connelly then showed the script to the cast. Hugh Beaumont, who brought Ward Cleaver to life on the show, commented, "I like the idea of Wally wanting to be a writer. I did a little writing myself when I was a young man." Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver's little friend Whitey Whitney, praised to the references to Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, whose works he greatly admired.
       Mosher and Connelly telegraphed Kerouac, asking if he would care to work with Roland MacLane and Dick Conway on future episodes should ABC reverse its decision to cancel the show. While they waiting for a response, the second submission arrived.
       The Gomalco Productions offices were rocked by the arrival in the mail of The Beaver of Wrath by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In this script, the aging Steinbeck seeks out the essential kinship between the migrants of the depression, whom he eulogized, and the Cleaver family, who epitomize for him the fulfillment of the promise of the Joads.



    

THE BEAVER OF WRATH

John Steinbeck


The gray soil of Metzger's Field turns to white and the red tanbark of the schoolyard is burned a pale pink by the sun. The people of Mayfield, the people of the land from Camelback Cutoff down to Bell Port, watch Miller's Pond dry into its own mud.
       Beaver walks down the road toward home, just released from Saturday school detention for punching Larry Mondello in the stomach. He finds the people of Mayfield streaming out of town in their station wagons. Eddie Haskell wanders by, philosophizing humbly. Beaver says, "Creep! Creep! Creep!" Eddie shakes his head. "Nope, I used to be a creep. But I asked myself, What is it a man can be a creep about? and I knew it was only hisself. I heard you punched a squirt." Beaver says, "Yeah, and I'd do it again if I had to."
       They find Ward, in golf sweater, tie, and overalls, squatting in the front yard, drawing patterns in the dust with his newspaper. Wally squats beside him, saying, "Gee, Pa, it's Satiddy afternoon and thar ain't no water in the pond. The fambly ain't got a chancet of a good picnic now." June says, "I seen in the picture books oncet how they's water up to Friend's Lake. I'd like to get me one o' them little picnic tables with trees all around." She spies Beaver and says, "Praise Gawd for vittory! Now I got my whole Cleaver fambly about me again! And if it ain't the old creep!"
       Eddie says, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, but I ain't a creep no more. No man's got business bein' more of a creep than any other." June loads the station wagon with pork bones and baloney sandwiches. Gilbert, Richard, Whitey, Larry, and Violet Rutherford pile on the luggage rack. Wally leads Lumpy to join them. Lumpy says, "Gosh, will there be rabbits we're going, Wally?" "Sure, Lump, you'll have lots of rabbits." "Oh, boy, Wally, and can I eat the rabbits, Wally, huh?"

       On the way out of town they meet Gus Chong, the old Chinese fireman and crooked merchant. Wally buys Ward a dog and Beaver beats Wally to a pulp. They find work selling frogs at demeaning wages. In moral outrage, Eddie becomes a creep again and is beaten up by Richard and Gilbert. Beaver is bruised and knows he must go. 
       June struggles to keep her fambly together, but Beaver says, "Don't be thinkin' about me bein' gone, Ma. Wherever there's kids in trouble, I'll be there. Wherever there's a creep givin' the business to a squirt, Ma, I'll be there." June dries her tears on the dusty sleeve of her old gingham dress.

    
TAG: At night, Wally is doing his 'lectronics homework at his desk. Beaver is packing peaches into a crate. He says, "Hey, Wally, are there any brothers in the Bible with the initials W and B?" Wally says, "Gosh, Beav, I don't know. I ain't no preacher. I'm just a man o' the land." They collapse exhausted into bed and turn out the meager light, but the room goes on glowing warmly. 

Dharma Beaver

Thirty years ago this month, my first book was published... and in the process served up one of the more amusing ironies of my life. 
       Before we wrote The Beaver Papers, Will Jacobs and I had worked constantly, furiously, and obsessively to become published novelists. Nothing else had mattered to either of us since our teens except "becoming a writer," and to us, like most young lit-heads, that meant novels. I'd dropped out of college to write novels; Will had refused to go in the first place. We met at a used bookstore, where we'd both taken jobs in order not to have to think about anything but books. We'd each written a few of the things, every one of them completely dismissed by every agent and editor we sent them to. Then we wrote one together—in multiple Faulknerian first person voices—which garnered no greater worldly success than the comment by our boss at the bookstore that "it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be." Ultimately we even compromised our literary purity just so we could jam a foot into the doorway of publishing: Will wrote a hard-boiled mystery and I wrote a kids' book. Those didn't work any better than the Faulkner homage had.
       During those years of frustration, we would blow off steam by writing nonsense to make each other laugh. We discovered that parody enabled us both to try on the clothes of the writers we loved and to make fun of the crap that we saw other (luckier, less deserving) writers getting away with. We wrote intentionally bad poetry and mock scholarly reviews. And we wrote summaries of episodes of Leave It to Beaver as if they'd been written by all our favorite authors. None of it intended for anyone's eyes but our own...and sometimes those of a long-suffering roommate.
       But when those roommates—Jim Zook for me, Chip Kabrich for Will—started laughing out loud at our Beaver parodies, we experienced, for the first time in our lives, what it was like to write for an audience that actually wanted to hear us. It was a heady feeling, enough to make us write twenty-five of those parodies and read them to anyone who would sit still. At some point, I don't remember when or how, we realized that we might be able to get a book out of them, and maybe even sell it to a publisher...and if we could get any book into print, even this silly thing, then surely that would open the door to getting our novels published!
       We were almost right about that. Every sale we've made since then—humor articles, comic books, nonfiction books, screenplays—has happened, directly or indirectly, because of this book that we knocked off to distract ourselves from the frustration of not being able to sell any of the books that we were determined to build our careers on. But one thing still hasn't happened: after thirty years, neither of us has gotten a novel published. God, as they say, has a good sense of humor. 
       Now, on to the second excerpt and the first parody...
      

May 5, 1963

Jack Kerouac, leading voice of the Beat Generation, often wrote about the search for America. Here, on the heels of his Big Sur, he brings to light the search theme that was always latent in Leave It to Beaver. 

DHARMA BEAVER

Jack Kerouac

Eddie steals a bike and passes Mary Ellen Rogers' house on the way to Wally's. Mary Ellen, on the porch with her friend Elma, nudges her and says, "There goes Eddie Haskell. I wonder where he's going to?" Elma looks mystified and says, "I wonder where he's coming from?"
       At Wally's, Eddie says, "Hey, Sam, what state are we in?" Wally, at his desk in his bedroom, typing on a huge roll of paper, says, "Aw, go on, Eddie. I don't have time to think about things like that. I'm writing a novel." Eddie says, "Oh, yeah? Do you have time to notice that?" He points to the bike out the window. "Gee, where'd you get the new wheels?" asks Wally. Beaver, reading A Coney Island of the Mind, says, "Aw, he probably swiped it." Eddie says, "Shut up, squirt. You don't know the meaning of Beat."
       Beaver asks, "Hey, Wally, what direction is San Francisco from here?" Wally looks mystified: "Gee, I dunno, Beav. In geography class they told us it was on the West Coast, but...." Eddie says, "Come on, Gertrude, don't be such a square. Why do you think I swiped the wheels? These old-timers don't know any more about where we are than we do. We've got to found out for ourselves." "Gosh, I don't know, Eddie," says Wally. But Eddie insists and Wally agrees. Eddie says, "All we've got to do is make tracks until we get to some city we've heard of. Then we'll know what state we're in."   

       On the way out of Mayfield they pass the Rutherfords', where Lumpy is sitting in a Lotus position on the front lawn. When the boys ask him what he's doing, Lumpy responds, "I'm getting ready for my trip to Japan." Wally says, "Gee, you mean your dad's letting you go? What are you gonna do there?" Lumpy says, "I'm gonna be a Buddhist monk and write poetry." "A Buddhist monk, Sam?" says Eddie. "Those old Chinamen won't let you eat!" Lumpy says, "Really? Gosh, Daddy didn't tell me that." Wally asks, "By the way, Lumpy, what direction is Japan from here?"
       They pass a road sign reading, BELL PORT, 5 MILES. Wally says, "Gee, Eddie, it's like we're in search of America." Eddie says, "To hell with that, Sam. I just want to know where in America we are."
       They arrive in Bell Port, buy a bottle of whiskey, drink themselves blind, and recite Ginsberg's Howl in chorus. They accost strangers and ask where they are. Unanimously, the strangers answer, "In Bell Port." They ask, "But where's Bell Port?" The strangers look at them, mystified, and walk away.
       They awake among empty bottles in a sleazy hotel. Suddenly Ward enters to take them home. At home, in the den, Ward says, "When I was your age, Wally, I went looking for America too. But then I realized that this was America, right here in Mayfield." Wally says, "Sure, Dad. But what part of America?" Ward looks mystified. 

TAG: Beaver bursts into the boys' bedroom waving an envelope. "Hey, Wally! Hey, Wally! Look, you got a letter from Viking Press." Wally opens the envelope and says, "Holy cow, Beav. They're publishing my novel." Beaver teases him good-naturedly in his screeching falsetto: "Bookworm! Bookworm!" Wally good-naturedly hits him with a pillow.


Next week: John Steinbeck's The Beaver of Wrath. 

Thirty Years

It hit me recently, with a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and horror, that I was up against the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book. It was August, 1983, that The Beaver Papers, written with my friend Will Jacobs, first hit the bookstores and launched the long, strange trip of my career. 
       That's a long time, thirty years. A lot can happen in that much time. In that much time, nations can fall and new industries can be born, careers can begin and end, babies can grow up and have babies of their own. In that much time, a bright-eyed, nervous, inexhaustible, naive 26-year-old who thinks his life will be perfect if he can only get a book published can turn into a tired, slightly cantankerous 56-year-old who sometimes wonders why the hell he ever wanted to write books in the first place. (Not saying that did happen. But it could have.)
       This is how long ago it was: Will and I wrote it with pens on paper, then revised it on a typewriter, fixing our mistakes with Liquid Paper. We could only work together when we could physically meet or when we were each at our homes, so that we could talk on the telephones plugged into our walls. When it was done we went to the library and collected agents' addresses from a book called Literary Marketplace, then we had copies of a cover letter run off at Kinko's, folded them and put them in envelopes, licked stamps and stuck them on the outside, and carried them to a mailbox. Then we waited, knowing it would take days to get even the quickest responses. It's amazing that anything got published at all in those days. 
       Also how long ago it was: Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that we had both been fascinated with since childhood, off the air for twenty years and already feeling like an echo of a distant era, was being shown every afternoon on broadcast television. (Now it's been off for fifty years, a number I can hardly make sense of, and although it hasn't been entirely forgotten, it's not the icon it was; at that time, though, everyone knew it and got what it represented.) Somehow or other, Will and I started watching it together, making fun of it but also yearning a bit for that lost world—which was the lost world of pre-Vietnam America but also the lost world of wholesome TV and the lost world of our own suburban childhoods, before we became city boys and drove ourselves into anxious madness with dreams of being professional writers.
       Then one of us, we don't remember who, made a joke about what if some unwholesome, un-TV writer of the time—very possibly Jack Kerouac—had written about the Cleaver family. 
       To honor this anniversary of mine, I've decided to post an except from the book every few weeks from now through August. I'm sure I'll also try to dust off some memories of how it all happened. I'll have to resist the temptation to rewrite as I go—that young me and young Will could turn out an infinite variety of clunky sentences and bad transitions, but I have to admit that they were able to do things we could never do now. Even as I cringe at my old lack of polish, I can't help admiring my old energy, impulsiveness, and cock-surety. 
       Let's start with the original, preposterous introduction...  

On May 3, 1963, the news filtered down from ABC to Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly that "Leave It to Beaver" would probably be canceled. Just a month before, network executives had told Mosher and Connelly, producers and head writers of the show, that if new blood could be put into "Beaver," the series might be saved. But after weeks of frustrating meetings with regular writers Dick Conway and Roland MacLane and multi-talented director-star Hugh Beaumont, it was conceded that no new ideas could be contrived. 
       Mosher suggested an episode in which brother Wally gets drunk on near-beer, but Connelly vetoed it as being too outlandish. Connelly suggested an episode in which June appeared in a pair of slacks, but Beaumont considered it lewd. Beaumont suggested an episode in which Beaver actually metamorphosed into a rodent, but Mosher and Connelly denounced it as derivative.

       MacLane and Conway completed a script in which Beaver gets a flat tire on his bike and conceals it from his parents, but network executives, although impressed with its daring, decided that it didn't quite fit their standards for new blood.
       By May 5 the staff had cleared their desks and prepared to go to pasture when, with the afternoon mail delivery, the first submission arrived. 
       Clearly the news of Beaver's impending cancellation had leaked out quickly, evidently reaching as far as Lowell, Massachusetts, for Jack Kerouac was the first to rise in support of Beaver. His script, Dharma Beaver, was the first drop in a deluge of literary brilliance to flood the network offices. From Montmartre and Tokyo they flowed in; from North Beach and Greenwich Village, from Majorca and Fresno; and from as far away as Moscow and Nigeria. The cry rang like a trumpet blast through the artistic community of the globe: "The Beaver is endangered! Save the Beaver!" Even the petition to free Jean Genêt from prison did not inspire such solidarity among the literati of the world. Before the summer was through, mankind would witness a flowering of the arts since it had not seen since the Italian Renaissance. 
     Now, after years of diligent research into old studio files, we have pieced together the story of the "Lost Season." We present here the events of that summer, along with summaries of the twenty-five unproduced scripts that were slated for the 1963-1964 season of "Leave It to Beaver." Although dozens of other scripts were submitted, we include only those that meet the highest literary standards. 
       We  have endeavored to preserve the writing styles and dialogue of the scripts wherever possible. The fruits of the "Lost Season" have been harvested at last.

I'll post the first fruit, Dharma Beaver, next time.

They had faces then. Scary, creepy faces.

Every July I've been blogging about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the reliable highlights of my year. This year they've given us a lagniappe in the form of an additional three-day festival in June, this one a celebration of Alfred Hitchcock.

Yes, Hitch was young once, not very fat and with a full head of hair. He was also, at the age of 24, directing movies for Gainsborough Pictures. At the age of 27, after the release of The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog, he was pretty generally recognized as Britain's most brilliant director. He made ten movies in the 1920s, before recorded sound took over. Fortunately for us, nine have survived, a remarkable number given that the vast majority of silent movies are gone forever. Starting Friday the 14th, all nine of them will be showing at the splendid, battered, indestructible Castro Theater.

       I've seen only two of the movies previously—or really one and a half, because the version of Blackmail I saw was the talkie, with muffled dialogue sequences jammed in during production (and I have faith that it will be even better with the gorgeous Mont Alto Orchestra accompanying it in its original conception). Both were dazzling and clever and chilling. If the other seven are only half as good as those, they will be fun and rewarding. And if they're not even that good, I know there will be at least those few moments of Hitchcockian ingenuity to make it all worthwhile.
       These movies were quickly made, a few a year, and without Hollywood budgets (which even then were vast in comparison to London budgets). There will be no dangling off the face of Mt. Rushmore or assaults by crop dusters or murderous flocks of birds. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. In this tighter, more intimate frame, he had to exercise his genius for finding the single, riveting, unnerving image. With the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of silent films, he could bring out that most visceral disquiet stirred by the human face. As I found when I pulled a few images from the movies in the festival:

 

So there will be great images, clever plots, beautiful music, the old magic of the Castro, and that fiercely enthusiastic crowd the festival always brings out. There will also be the presence of the British Film Institute, who saved and restored these movies, raising lots of pleasant memories for me of warm, breezy summer evenings on the South Bank of the Thames. It'll be a good weekend. And then just a month later comes the regular Silent Film Festival. Life is abundant.

Elements of Story

Last time, I posted the basic idea of the Finding Your Story workshop I teach at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, including my thoughts on what I call “the heart of the story.” A couple of past participants suggested I share some of the other story-writing principles I talk about, so here we go...

Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.
       I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette  of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):

1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.

2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.

3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.

By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.
       Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.

      In The Maltese Falcon, the shenanigans involving the pursuit of the black bird (the physical plot) occupy most of the screen time and generate most of the specific scenes. They’re fun and provide a lot of great moments, but they’re also confusing and ultimately not even that important to understand. The emotional and moral story of Sam Spade himself, though, is powerful: a compromised man, sleeping with both his partner’s wife and the woman who turns out to have murdered said partner, comes to realize that there’s still a code of conduct in this dirty world, that “when a man’s partner is murdered he’s supposed to do something about it.”
       Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.
       And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.
        These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.
       Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.
       It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.
       In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.
       For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.


***


At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”
       Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”
       A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.

         That can be tragic: he wants to dismiss the Sphinx’s prophecy and live the life he desires, telling Fate to go screw herself and living by his own will, right down to killing the king of Thebes and marrying his widow. But what he really needs is to learn to respect this Fate. Because she’s always going to win.
       The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)
        The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.

       Usually a happy ending comes because a character figures out what he needs instead of what he wants just in time to change events and attain what he needs. In the best tragic endings the character figures out the same thing—but just too late to change events and get what he needs.
       George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.
       Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”
       Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:

1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).

2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).

You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.
       In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.
       In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!) 
       One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.
       Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.
       In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.
       You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.
       Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.
       That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story: try starting at the end and plotting backward.
       Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.
       Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.


***


“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.