Why I Write...Today

Every few days, especially when the deadlines come faster than the words, I ask myself why in the hell I ever decided to write for a living. A rhetorical question, of course; except that I recently made the mistake of asking it in front of my therapist, who immediately responded, “Well...why did you?”

      Any simple answer seemed inadequate. That’s the thing about a long career: what drove you to pick it up in the first place may be entirely irrelevant to what keeps you doing it now. A great deal of disenchantment can grow in that gap, especially if it’s unacknowledged. I have to ask myself not just why I made that decision but why I keep making it over and over again, every day that I don’t decide to do something else.

      It was fear that got me started. When I was fourteen my mom pulled me out of school, inspired by one of her alcoholic delusions; I was ashamed to talk to my friends, and pretty soon they forgot about me, leaving me with no companions but my dog and my fantasies. Right before I turned sixteen it dawned on me that sooner or later I'd have to enter the adult world and make my own living, an idea I found horrifying. What did I know how to do but read and make up stories? So I made what I can now pass off as a daring decision but was in fact the only safe one I could think of: I was going to make my living as a writer of fiction.
      Within a few months I was back in school, although not the same school I'd left. I wanted to make friends, but I felt like such a freak that I needed something to hide behind. My new aspirations were perfect for that. To my peers I became that weird kid who was always writing, which was better than being just that weird kid. To my English teachers I was that weird kid who deserved special attention. I was very productive for my age, mostly because I was afraid to stop.

     Then things started to get better: my writing intrigued a cute and only slightly nerdy girl, who became my first girlfriend, and eventually my wife; then it led me to take a job at a used bookstore where wannabe writers were not only approved of but even given a sort of dusty glamor. Another guy at the store, Will Jacobs, talked me into collaborating with him for the hell of it, and we started reading the results to our friends. Pretty soon we were hosting parties just to give readings. Our humorous stuff went over best—I think that’s where my giddy new love of existence came through loudest. By my early twenties, writing had become my greatest source of joy.
       Fortune just kept turning her wheel in my favor. Will and I landed an agent and sold a humor book. It sold well and got us interviews and reviews all over the country. The editor of the National Lampoon called and asked us to write for him. I even quit my day job. Joy and love were rewarded.
      The trouble with Fortune is that she never knows when to stop the goddamn turning. Our second book tanked. We couldn't sell the third. We broke with our agent and couldn't get another one. The Lampoon burned us out. I couldn't even get my old day job back. Writing had become all about frustration and anxiety; but it was also the only way I could imagine to get back to the joy.

    The way back turned out to be, of all things, one of my favorite old escape routes from adolescence: I started writing comic books, and apparently I was pretty good at it. Suddenly writing meant flights to New York for editorial meetings, collaborations with great cartoonists, fans lining up at comic conventions, a strangely sweet power over the fates of my childhood heroes. My comics attracted attention in Hollywood, so now writing also meant flights to L.A. for development meetings, agents buying me breakfast, and more money than I’d ever expected to make. I don’t know if that was quite joy, but it felt good.
       Money's sneaky, though: it wants you to spend it. My wife and I bought a house, she quit work for the first five years of our son's life, then we put him in a private school. When the work slowed a bit, I was hooked like a trout; the writing had to be mainly about money. But I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't write just for money.
       I wish I could claim that at as an ethical stance, but no. I just didn't know how to write well when I didn't care about the work. So the work started to suck, and people stopped hiring me, and finally the answer to "why do I write?" became "desperation." I went kind of crazy with it, actually. I took on writing jobs I felt contempt for. I tried to make up for writing bad things by writing worse things. I discovered old child-of-alcoholic patterns I didn’t know were there. My marriage hit the rocks and so did a lot else.

       Some of us are slow learners: I was in my early forties when I finally realized that the only way to write something good was to write something I believed in. What I believed in most was my son. His mom was now working full time, and for a while not living with me, so I did a lot of hands-on parenting. Watching him deal with the struggles of kindergarten, thinking about my own childhood, I decided I had to write a book about fantasy, growing up, and symbolic conflict. 
      That book came out under the name Killing Monsters, and soon I was giving interviews, engaging in public debates, and writing articles to say things I believed about children and imagination. For the first time, I could answer “why do I write?” with “to say something that matters.”
      I decided to reorganize my life around that answer. The new work wasn't paying all the bills yet, so I kept the least demanding just-for-money work and refinanced the house to pull money out of my equity (there was a time you could do such things). I joined the San Francisco Writers Grotto to build a professional network. I wrote another book I believed in and sold the proposal for a third. I thought that by the age of fifty I might be making all this work.
      Then my son got sick. He’d been suffering from periodic migraines since second grade, but in sixth grade they turned chronic and disabling. He had a few respites over the next couple of years, but in high school the migraines came down like an avalanche, sweeping his whole life away. 
      I let them sweep a lot of me away, too. Yes, there were other issues: marriage again, money as ever, having to rethink the book after someone else published one too much like my original idea. But it was the parenting that carried me over the edge. If I wasn’t trying to help my son get to school or catch up on his work, if I wasn't talking to neurologists and homeopaths and psychologists, then I was worrying obsessively about everything I wasn’t doing. “Why do I write?” became “why can’t I write?” And that, as we all know, becomes a spiral in itself.

       Which is when I learned how much I need other people. A little band of us at the Grotto confessed our productivity issues to each other in a group we called Ass-Kickers Anonymous. I also went to real 12-step meetings for "compulsive underearners." I lined up friends to offer me incentives or threaten me with punishments for getting my work done or not. I started another book with my old friend Will Jacobs to remind myself that writing can be more play than work. I even let another Grotto member talk me into teaching classes, where I was reminded how much writing means to people who are still trying to master it.
       Bit by bit, with a lot of help, I started turning the spiral the other direction. I began to get rough paragraphs down, then rough chapters. Ideas that had once lain strewn across the chaos of my brain began to come together, and every once in a while I'd discover that a graceful sentence had somehow slipped through. Still, though, if you’d asked me why I wrote, the best answer I could have come up with was just that not writing was too frightening an option to contemplate.

      Then, this past fall, near the end of a long, hard draft of the new book, I participated in the Grotto’s group reading at San Francisco’s annual literary block party, LitCrawl. I can’t quite tell you why, but I decided to read a piece from The Beaver Papers, the humor book Will and I wrote thirty years ago that became my first published work. Reading it gave me a sense of the totality of my career, the most joyful times and the most grueling.
      Later, the Grotto gang came together at the LitCrawl after-party. At first I drifted toward a conversational clump, but I kept feeling pulled toward the dance floor. Holly Jones saw me wavering and pulled me out onto the floor. Soon a bunch of us who’d read that night were out there, celebrating our rare moment of glamor and blowing off our tension. We didn’t say a word about writing; we sang crappy pop lyrics and whooped for each other’s more ridiculous moves. But that night I had no questions about why I wrote.
     Like I say, that’s the thing about a long career. I chose writing in the first place so I could avoid other people, but I keep doing it now so I can connect with them. Tomorrow I may finally wake up and realize I have no reason to keep choosing this job. But just for today, I know why I’m here.

Dad in a Bag

Getting ready for my dad’s memorial party—he wasn’t the type to want any kind of memorial service, but a family gathering at his sister Betty’s place to share anecdotes about him would have suited him just fine—I pulled the bag of his ashes out of the particle-board box that the crematorium sold as its lowest-priced “urn” to see if it might fit into something fancier.

       It was disorienting, lifting that clear plastic bag full of white, stony chips into the light and trying to realize that these were the last physical remains of my father. He had been so huge in my imagination once, so limitless in strength and knowledge, so frighteningly and reassuringly potent, that it made no sense to think that he could be reduced to this, a bag the size of a head of lettuce and light enough to bounce in the palm of my hand.
       In my earliest memories, my father was a towering figure who could lift me into the air and set me on his shoulders as though I had no weight at all. Looking down from his height, I understood that the world he strode through was far smaller and less frightening than the one that loomed over me, that the mysteries of high shelves and counter tops lay exposed to him and that to him the neighborhood dogs who glared into my eyes were only knee-high pests. Once my mother hinted that he might spank me for something I’d done, and although he’d never once hit me—she was the only one who ever did that—the mere suggestion that he might turn his strength against me made me burst into sobs of terror.

       I learned to hike by following him on the trails of Glacier National Park, and I can still picture him ahead of me on the trail, rising against the sky like the erosion-carved pillars that jutted from the mountains themselves. The more I learned about the larger world, the larger my father seemed. In those years the culture of American boys was filled with recapitulations of World War II—Combat on TV, G. I. Joe under the Christmas tree, Iron Crosses scrawled on homework folders—and the knowledge that my father had fought in that war, that he had manned a giant gun on a Navy cruiser off the shores of Guadalcanal and felt the shudder of Japanese shells exploding against the hull beneath his feet, gave him the magnitude of a mythic hero.
       But somewhere along the way, he and I seem to have stepped in front of a pair of fun-house mirrors, because suddenly he looked much smaller and I looked much bigger. I remember the day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, when he and I were heading home after an impromptu lunch with a family friend and it dawned on him that my mother might have made lunch for us in our absence and would be annoyed if we came home with no appetites; he asked me not to tell her we’d already eaten and to join him in forcing down a second lunch, and it struck me that my father was afraid of my mother, far more afraid than I was. From that moment on, I think, I saw him as smaller than me and in need of my protection.
       During one of our last hikes together in Glacier Park, his fifty-five year old knees gave out and I had to rush ahead to stop the boat docked at the trail head on Two Medicine Lake from leaving before he could limp to it. It was the sort of physical heroism he’d once have exhibited for me. I began to understand his emotional as well as his physical fragility: listening more carefully to his war stories, I could hear that he had been a hero—he saved men’s lives that night off Guadalcanal—but he had also been just a twenty-one year old kid who would never entirely recover from feeling his world being blown apart around him.

       Decades later, as my mother lay dying and my father began to come apart emotionally, cognitively, and finally physically, I would have to become much bigger than he was. I comforted him, took over his finances, sold his home for him, and found him a new place to live. I became his father. He shrank into a wheelchair, so that when we went out I now looked down on the top of his head as he had once looked down on mine. His memory decayed relentlessly, leaving him smaller and smaller as a person. In his last weeks, the only sentence I heard him speak was “Hold my hand.”

       At last he became no more than an unconscious body in a bed, and then not even that. When he died he became smaller still, his chest no longer inflated by breath and the flesh of his face no longer plumped up by blood. I left the hospital room for a while and came back to find that he'd been zipped into a body bag but still not removed to the morgue. Where my father had lived for his last few days there was now a six-foot long, two-foot wide translucent plastic bag, tented here and there by jagged bones. To the very end he had held the firm jaw and closed lips that had always given him an air of strength; but now through the gauzy plastic I could see the dark oval of his open mouth below the peak of his nose, and somehow that made what was left of him look hollow and insubstantial.

       Now my father is in another bag, a bag of little chips that crunches when I squeeze it. I see him beside me, chuckling at the absurdity of it: “You mean that’s me? Son of a gun!”

       But this is how we all shrink, isn’t it? Most dramatically in the eyes of our children but also in our own. My son once saw me as the giant man who could protect him from anything and always knew best, an image I very much wanted to sustain for us both. But in the years he wrestled with his chronic migraines, as each new doctor I brought him to proved unable to help him and nearly every plan of attack I suggested either fell short or backfired, as I encouraged him to keep trying while I failed more and more to keep the frustration and despair out of my own voice, he watched me shrink.

       First Nicky pushed back against my advice with a frustrated anger of his own, but then his attitude shifted to that surest evidence that parent and child are changing places: compassion. He told his therapist that he felt bad for me because I’d become so miserable about my inability to help him, and he asked how he could explain to me, without hurting my feelings, “that it isn’t his responsibility to solve my problems.”

       It’s not just my son’s perspective on me that’s changed, of course, but my own. I felt so capable of soothing his fears and helping him through life’s crises when he was little, and for years I clung to the belief that I could help him through this one too, that his mom and I would eventually find the right medical or nutritional or psychological treatment that would restore him to the life he wanted. Jennie was able to admit much earlier than I that we seemed to be up against something powerful and incomprehensible, that we should think about lowering our expectations and accommodating the illness rather than continuing to try to beat it. I think it’s just that she was more invested in easing his pain than in proving to him that action and determination could win the fight, which had a lot to do with a mom’s willingness to look human and right-sized, while I wanted so much to see myself as powerful and heroic.

       In the end, her wisdom prevailed; now Nicky turns mainly to her for medical advice, and I don’t question his judgment.  There are still areas where he turns to me for guidance—just last night he asked me how to get payments on a PayPal account—but those areas are a lot smaller than they used to be. Just like me.

        It will be a long while before I’ve shrunk away the way my father ultimately did. I’ll still have my moments of bigness. But someday my son will also be handed the bag that contains his father. Someday he will be able to hold me as easily as I hold my father, as easily as I held him when he was little, as easily as my father held me.

Programmed for Drama

It's nearly impossible not to fixate on the Republican primaries in fascination and horror—but don't we all really know it's entirely about nothing? When you look at the big picture, Mitt Romney's nomination still looks as inevitable as it ever did, despite the news articles after every bump in the road proclaiming that it's now a whole new race.

      Most of us have figured Mitt in 2012 was inevitable since he lost the Florida primary in '08, if only because of the culture of GOP voting: those voters are conservative in more than just their policies, nearly always nominating the lead bridesmaid from the last election. McCain was Bush's runner up in 2000, Dole was the elder Bush's in '88, Bush was Reagan's in '80, Reagan was Ford's in '76. The younger Bush hadn't run before, but he was his own sort of heir apparent, as was Nixon in '68. Democrats love outsiders, fresh faces, and upsets (Obama, Clinton, Carter, McGovern, Kennedy), but Republicans haven't gambled on one since the Goldwater disaster of '64. And elephants never forget.

      Still, we seize on each new twitch of the seismograph—Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, Gingrich—thinking that this is the one that proves the ground is really shifting. Similarly, we want to believe that the prolonged GOP battle will help Obama or that Mitt's credibility will be subtly but fatally damaged all the way to November. But we know just as well that if the economy is looking okay in October Obama will win, but if it's tanking Romney will. We can remind ourselves of that any time with a look at Allan Lichtman's Keys to the White House, but that's not half as much fun as this week's Gallup poll showing something that we know it won't be showing next week.

      It's instinctive, I think. We evolved to be alert to danger and opportunity, and so our bodies crave that feeling of spotting something the instant it appears and being first to jump. It's the same instinct that keeps us twisting in suspense through a summer action movie with an ending we predicted when we saw the trailer. As much as we may wish in our prefrontal cortices to be sensible realists who take the long view, the love of drama and surprise is in our cells. Like low-hanging fruit or a crouching leopard, the merest glimpse of a Newt Gingrich nomination holds us rapt.

Up from Hell

Continuing my excerpts from the most recent draft of the new book, introducing the second major character...

In 1868, when Anthony Comstock was still rather new to the anti-vice crusade, a baby was born in the Missouri Ozarks to a sick young woman and her alcoholic husband. They named him Bernard but called him Barney.

      There were, according to one folk saying, only two routes out of the Ozarks: Heaven and Hell. This was bleak land, lost in the center of America. The people who populated it were the Scots-Irish and the rural English who had been displaced from their farms by sheep centuries before, who had been sent into Scotland to break that old nation and then sent into Ireland with Cromwell to kill Catholics and take their land, then sent across the sea to subdue America.

      These were not the merchants and planters who stayed on the coasts and prospered. These were small farmers, itinerant laborers, borderline hunter-gatherers, independents and drifters who could not compete with the slave-worked plantations and moved upward into the hills, then over the hills and across Alabama, Mississippi,  northern Louisiana, displaced by plantations or lumber or mills. Many stayed in those places to become sharecroppers or millhands, but others kept moving, slowly ever west, until by the last days of the great slave empires they were chopping the stubborn trees and breaking the rocky soil of the Ozarks. Then the Civil War came. Missouri was split in half, the prairies of the north loyal to the Union and the Ozarks—selling their poor crops southward, toward Louisiana and the Gulf—loyal to the slavers. Men went off to die in a losing cause, and if they did not die they came home to a land of resistant hills and rutted dirt roads now lost in poverty.

      There was one way to survive: work. Backbreaking work, in the clay, in the sun. And there were two ways to survive that work: liquor and the church. Many chose both, at least for a while, drinking as they worked and drinking more to kill the pain afterward, then dragging themselves to church on Sunday. But eventually one or the other master would demand absolute fealty. There were those who renounced sin to wed themselves to the church (unless niggardliness or cruelty were sins), and they were the ones who survived the hard winters and prospered a bit and passed farms down to their children. And there were those who lived to drink and sometimes fight and sometimes go whoring and now and then gamble on a horse race or a wrestling matching in the center of town, and they were the ones who looked happier for a while until they died at forty or fifty or they simply vanished, leaving wives and children and jobs to drift off to some river city where enough money could be cadged to pay for the next binge and a room in a flophouse until they found their way to hell. A harsh heaven and an easy hell, these were the only two ways out of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri.

      Bernard McFadden’s father chose hell. He seemed to want another path at first, as so many young men did before the sheer hardness of the place broke them down. He married a nice girl and fathered two children and took a series of jobs. But the horse track beckoned, and so did various small gambling scams, and most of all so did bourbon. He would vanish for weeks, leaving his wife to survive as best she could with the help of family and what work she could find washing clothes or cleaning houses. She became ill—tuberculosis, the scourge of the American poor—and he came back to take care of her and make it up to her. Then he drifted to the horses and the bottle again, and she threw him out. And then one more time she took him back, and then she threw him out again, and then he drank himself to death at the age of forty-one.

      His wife did not last long beyond him. She tried to raise her two children alone, but as the consumption drained the life from her, she had to give them up to relatives. The girl was raised in some normality by cousins, farmers to the north, in the richer flatlands. She would grow up a farm girl, marry, and vanish into the obscurity of the vast American heartland. But girls were considered easier to keep and more valuable around the house. Her older brother Barney, seven years old and with a stubborn, resentful streak that reminded his mother’s family of his loathed father, proved harder to place. He was put to work in an uncle’s hotel, assigned to help clean the rooms and run errands for the guests.

      Barney’s most vivid early memory is screaming in loss and rage as his mother left him with her uncle and walked away. She had been the only source of comfort and protection in his life, the only thing that he had once believed would stay. He pined for her return until the news came by mail a year later that she had died.

      He did not get along with his aunt, who would have much preferred a hired girl and resented the penury of her husband that left her with this stiff-necked boy. She would accuse him of stealing things, and when she wouldn’t believe in his innocence he began to steal things for real to defy her. Once he stole a pencil from a guest. It was clear who must have stolen it, and Barney’s sullen expression on being accused only confirmed it, but he would not admit he had taken it. His aunt beat him, in full view of the guest, but he would not admit. At the angry guest’s insistence, his uncle beat him harder, but still he denied having taken the pencil. He offered no alibis or arguments, he just denied. When he retold the story in adulthood he bragged about stealing the pencil, and about the fact that he didn’t even want it.

     It wasn’t greed that led him to the crime, nor was it any sense of injured justice that made him deny it. In both cases, it was will alone that drove him. That will would prove to be his greatest ally in the years to come, although sometimes a troublesome one.

      Barney's uncle wrote to his brother in St. Louis—the oldest sibling of the family and the one who was legally burdened with the disposition of his sister’s children—that his wife could endure this terrible child no longer. So Barney was trundled back to St. Louis to await a new assignation.

      This other uncle and aunt wanted no part of him. They had no financial use for him, for one thing. They had little hope for him, either: Barney was scrawny, sickly, and hollow-eyed, likely to develop the same consumption that killed his mother, unlikely even to reach adulthood. And if he did grow up, he would probably turn out to be just another drunkard like his father. Raising him would surely be a waste of time and money until he moved on—to heaven, if he died soon enough and innocent enough, to hell if he had the chance.

      Barney was hired out to a farm couple across the river in Illinois whom his uncle knew. No statutes forbade the use of child labor in agriculture. Although "hired out" was a dubious term, as his new employeers were told that they could keep him working for them indefinitely, that they had legal charge of him, that his uncle and aunt never needed to see him again. The boy was told he would be paid for his labor, but in fact he found it nearly impossible to extract any cash from his new master, being told that the value of his work rarely equaled what he cost in room and board. For the whole transaction, his uncle took a lump sum in cash. Barney had been sold.

      Work on the Jenkins farm was brutally hard. It produced a range of crops—squash, sorghum, beets, apples, corn—and supported a population of chickens and a few larger livestock. It made money, more than most in downstate Illinois in the years after the Civil War, but to do so it required constant and tremendous effort from Jenkins, his wife, his hired hands, and the indentured Barney.  The ground sloped sharply. The high ground was rocky and poor. The low spots were boggy, great breeding grounds for flies and mosquitoes. Every slope, every shoulder of a hill, every ravine, had to broken by plow and shovel to yield life.

      For the first few months, this seemed to Barney like the greatest hell he had yet endured. But then he noticed something: the work got easier. Stones that had once defied him, remaining stubbornly fixed to the earth as he tried to raise them with his trembling arms, began to move in his grasp. The pickaxe swung more easily. He lifted rails onto fences by himself that he had once been unable to raise without help from a jeering adolescent hired hand. In his first ten years, Barney had known little time outdoors, little physical labor, and his food had been sparse and poor. His body responded well to this new life. He hated the tedium of farm labor, and he hated his mean and parsimonious master, but he liked the feeling of growing power in his own limbs. He liked to feel his hardening muscles in bed at night and the deeper breaths he could draw in the cold morning air. Barney would come to believe that his real life began during his first spring and summer on that rocky soil.

      With greater strength came greater willfulness. Barney no longer defied his masters in secret or took his punishment in silence. He argued with Jenkins, pushed him for more spending money, took whippings and financial penalties, but kept arguing. He started picking fist fights with other boys, especially the boys who had pushed him around when he’d first arrived, determined to undo his earlier shame with displays of dominance. He learned to bring together his muscles, his will, and his willingness to endure pain and so to make himself an indefatigable fighter. He won respect and fear, but exploited neither. He became neither a bully nor a leader, preferring to make his point once and then walk away in silent self-containment. Since his mother had walked away from him he had sought nothing from beyond himself if he could help it. He enjoyed brief violence and seeing respect in other boys’ eyes, but he had no desire for friends or enemies.

      Such was Barney’s enjoyment of conflict, and the force of his will, that soon he was fighting with God. There were no open unbelievers in rural Illinois in 1880, no niche for doubters or free thinkers. There were Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians. The Jenkinses were of the last, adherents of a hard, Knoxian Presbyterianism wedded grimly to the humorlessness, predestination, and emotional brutality it had first brought from Scotland a century before. Theirs was the same Calvinist God who guided Anthony Comstock, but without the protectiveness that Comstock knew. Barney saw his master beat him and cheat him, then ride the buckboard to the local church every Sunday to pay homage to the God of love and compassion. He knew how many of the worshippers around him in that white-washed plank church drank and cheated and beat their wives and children. He had no philosophy to back him up, no sense of what rejecting religion might mean or even whether one could do it, but he decided early that everything spoken in church was a lie. He saw no evidence of God’s will manifest on earth; certainly no divine justice smiting the wicked and rewarding the virtuous.

      And so Barney brought all the distrust he had learned of people to the supposed truths that people had agreed to propound. He denied God in his heart and braced himself for divine retribution, but none came, and never again would he listen to anyone’s received wisdom. From that point on he would accept as the truth only what he arrived at through his own experience.

To be continued...

Death and Football

My dad died the day after my last post. Perfectly, for him—sadly, funnily, beautifully—he died during a 49er game. He would have appreciated the D. H. Lawrence poem I posted the day before; he was a literate enough guy. He would have appreciated the words I spoke to his unresponsive form late that night; he had his sensitivities, even if he didn't like to show them much. But he would have found much more meaning and poetry in the fact that he breathed his last as the Niners took a 9-6 lead into the locker room, flanked by both his sons. Most of all, I think he would have enjoyed the fact that because we were yelling at Jimmy Johnson's halftime inanities, we both missed his final breath.

      Russell Jones was a sweet man and a genial man, but not an easy man to reach. His father died when he was young, leaving him in the care of a cold, mean mother during the cold, mean Depression. (As my Aunt Betty likes to say of their childhood, "The wrong parent died.") The best years of his life were his first two in the Marines, 1940 and 1941; he had a place in the world, an ordered life, a community, and enough to eat for the first time in his life. Then the war tore that ordered world apart and sent his community of shipmates to the bottom of the Savo Sea. That, I think, was the betrayal that sent him into his shell for the rest of his life. He married a woman who seemed nothing like his mother but turned out to be too much like her in some painful ways. He endured an often cruel marriage by keeping his head down and his eyes turned away from his heart, and he sought comfort in the pleasures he'd learned to trust in childhood: old movies, hiking, big band jazz, fixing cars, and football.

      He wasn't one to stretch out and embrace his sons' interests; I suspect he was afraid to stretch too far beyond the places that felt safe to him. My brother and I learned, years apart and on our separate paths, that the way to connect with our father was by learning to care about his interests. Ray was the more physical one, the better hiker and the better repairman. I was the one who in his teens knew who directed The Public Enemy and who played lead trumpet for the Benny Goodman band. Both of us, though, knew the 49ers.

      When my brother was young, in the early 1950s, the family lived in San Francisco, at one point in an apartment across the street from Kezar Stadium. My dad would take him up to the roof to watch games for free, hoping nothing too exciting happened near the west end zone, where the curve of the stadium cut off their view. When Ray names players from those years, they echo with the depth and weight of a liturgy: Tittle, Perry, Nomellini, St. Clair. A decade later, when we were living in the suburbs and watching the games on TV, I learned to recite magic names of my own: Brodie, Washington, Wilcox, and the real Jimmy Johnson.

      The family kind of flew apart in the '70s. My brother wasn't getting along with our mom, who had developed an inexplicable distaste for his wife; I'd pretty much turned my back on my dad and his interests as I pursued the young-writer role that my mom liked to see me in. Then came that autumn day in 1981. I was living in San Francisco and couldn't help overhearing that the long-hopeless 49ers had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys 45-14. Not quite able to bring myself to be a football fan again, I nonetheless checked the sports section the next week to see that they'd beaten the Packers in Green Bay, then actually listened to the radio for a while as they held off the hated Rams to take control of the division. So when I visited my parents the next weekend, I suggested to my father that we watch the 49ers play the Steelers to see if these guys were for real.

      For years he had been following the 49ers on his transistor radio in the garage, if he managed to follow them at all, driven underground by my mother's loathing of sports. But she could raise no objection when her favored son (hell, I'd just landed a literary agent and had an editor interested in my first book) wanted to watch the game. San Francisco won. My dad, his heart wounded by decades of 49er disappointments, focused mainly on the fact that their offense hadn't been very productive, but I was excited, more excited than I'd ever have expected to be. I think that afternoon was the first time in years that I'd picked up the phone to call my brother. Had he been following these guys? Was this really happening? He'd also been burned by the Niners too many times, but I remember a cautious note of optimism in his voice when he said, "It looks like Montana might actually turn out to be a pretty good quarterback."

      Over the next two decades, the 49ers were the linchpin of my family's socializing. Watching them with either my brother or my father had a special sweetness; when Ray and I both managed to watch a game with the old man I felt as though I were part of a sort of triangular perfection. Gradually even our mom got excited by playoffs. The last time Ray and I took my dad on a major outing, when the hydrocephaly was beginning to rob him of his mobility, it was to see SF beat Detroit at Candlestick Park. The day, months after our mother died, when we moved our father into an assisted living facility, the 49ers were playing the Eagles; we plunked him down in the common room to watch the game, taking turns checking on him and the score. We forgot about the furniture moving for a while as our boys sealed the game with a magnificent goal-line stand, the last football we three watched together until the day our father died.

      His mental decline paralleled the team's decline. I watched a few games with him in the bad years of 2004 and '05, but he couldn't quite follow what was happening. The seasons after that were entirely lost to him, as was life itself except for a narrowing circle of emotions and half-memories. We got the call on a Sunday night that he'd gone into the hospital with pneumonia and might not come out. For a few days we lived at the hospital, watching him fight for life, until he settled into a morphine sleep. Then we took turns with the vigil, agreeing that it was too much to hope that we could both be there for his death, hoping that one of us could be.

      Late Sunday morning I came in to relieve Ray. He was watching the morning NFC game on the TV mounted to the hospital room wall. He would have left right away, so he could watch the 49er-Giants game at home, except that the Falcons put on a fourth-quarter rally to tie the Saints and he couldn't tear himself away. The Niners game started, and he decided to watch a little of it before he left. It turned out to be one of those gut-clenching defensive match-ups, and a little became the entire first half. We talked about how fitting it was that we got to watch one more game with Dad. When a doctor came in to check Dad's uneven breathing and stopped to look at the TV, Ray told him about watching games from the roof of that apartment building across from Kezar. In the closing minutes of the half I noticed that Dad's breathing had gotten more ragged, but how could I think about that with the Niners botching a chance to score right before going into the locker room?

      Finally, at halftime, Ray stood up and gathered up his book and his sweatshirt in order to go. He paused just long enough to watch Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson trading inane remarks. I looked at Dad to tell him, as a matter of ritual, that Ray was leaving. Then I said, "I don't think he's breathing."

      We watched the rest of the game together, with our late father between us. We talked about the immensity of what had just happened, the loss of our last parent. We talked about our memories of him and our gratitude that his decline hadn't dragged on any longer than it had. But we also talked about Justin Smith's perfectly timed leap to knock down Eli Manning's fourth-down pass and win the game for San Francisco. Russell Jones raised his sons to know what really matters.

To bid farewell to one's own self

My father is dying, and this is what I'm reading:

The Ship of Death

D. H. Lawrence

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one's own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall

thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!

Ah! can't you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul

finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold

that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make

with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make

a bruise or break of exit for his life;

but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder

ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,

that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet

of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take

the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death

that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,

already our souls are oozing through the exit

of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end

is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,

Already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark

and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine

for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying

and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us

and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying

and our strength leaves us,

and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,

cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood's black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go

only the deepening blackness darkening still

blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood

darkness at one with darkness, up and down

and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more

and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.

She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.

She is gone! gone! and yet

somewhere she is there.

Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone

completely under, gone, entirely gone.

The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,

between them the little ship

is gone

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread

separates itself on the blackness,

a horizontal thread

that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume

A little higher?

Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn

the cruel dawn of coming back to life

out of oblivion

Wait, wait, the little ship

drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey

of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow

and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell

emerges strange and lovely.

And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing

on the pink flood,

and the frail soul steps out, into the house again

filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace

even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!

for you will need it.

For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

(1929)

Election Predictions

Just so I can say, "Hey, look how smart I am!" a year from now...or say nothing at all...

It will be Mitt for the GOP. It was always going to be Mitt for the GOP, and so it will be. But I see Obama being reelected, by about one Ohio's worth of electoral votes. The Democrats will hold onto the Senate, narrowly. But they won't even get close to taking back the House. Which means the next five years will be just about the same as the last three...

The Enemy Silenced!

Continuing The Undressing of America: Anthony Comstock and the YMCA battle to convict the radical free-love, free-speech proponents Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin for indecency when they expose the sexual shenanigans of a prominent minister in the press:

Comstock was not content to be merely a player in the protracted Claflin case. That would always be a mark of his character: he was indefatigable and unwilling to stop. Although his sponsors at the YMCA distanced themselves from this case, they saw great value in his new fame and confidence. The Association was sending representatives to Washington to lobby for a stricter law on the mailing of obscene material, asking sympathetic lawmakers to help them prepare a strong case for the new Congress that would convene the following March. Even though the previous Congress had just passed a law covering the same ground, the YMCA argued that the fact that the prosecution had such a hard time constructing a case against Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was evidence in itself that the current statute was inadequate. Comstock began to accompany the association’s expeditions to the capital. At first he was baffled by the labyrinths of Washington, but his sheer passion, certainty, and knowledge of the extent of the evil of obscenity made a deep impression on many legislators.

      The Claflin case dragged on into 1873. Free on bail, the sisters traveled the Northeast giving speeches and continued to bring out issues of the Weekly. They regularly attacked Comstock as a hypocrite and a coward, and described the YMCA as “our new Protestant Jesuits” and said they would call its crusade a new Spanish Inquisition except that no one involved had the stature of a Torquemada. Many newspapers joined in the attack, if not quite so colorfully, complaining that such prosecutions were a dangerous threat to freedom of speech, declaring that the federal government’s involvement in what should have been a local issue was gross overstepping of its authority and an attack on American liberties, and that the prominence of a private citizen like Comstock in a federal case was a travesty.

      The federal prosecutors involved seemed less than enthusiastic about this case that looked weaker with each passing week. The entire aspect of the case involving Henry Ward Beecher was dropped, and by the spring the only charge still being pressed concerned the sisters’ far less interesting exposé of Challis the stockbroker. The sisters, their supporters, and many other observers denounced the whole procedure as simple persecution by Anthony Comstock and the YMCA.

      Comstock did not back down. Even as he grew less sanguine about the prospects of the case, he still saw it as a moral necessity to keep fighting. He stood in the middle of the courtroom one morning, looking at the seats filled with Claflin supporters, listened to their jeers, and knew he was up against “the hardest kind of free-lovers.” He knew that he must not surrender, even if the case went wrong, even if he became the target of national opprobrium: “What happens to me matters not at all,” he write in his diary. “The Master’s plan is everything.”

      His efforts were not without reward. Even as most newspaper stories on the Woodhull case did not go far beyond amusement and titillation, an increasing number of editorials denounced their values and philosophies as genuine threats to American life. More and more news stories rolled off the presses about free love, utopian communists, wealthy radicals, and dangerous publications. Many leaders of the feminist movement of which the sisters had been so vital a part condemned them for their insouciant dismissal of Christian morals and American traditions. Even as he was losing the case, Comstock stirred and focused public anxiety about indecency and the effects of mass publishing on the minds of young people and the future of the country.

      Nor was he idle. While the sisters were out on bail, he pushed the authorities to prosecute another newspaper publisher, a man named Frank Leslie whose weekly paper flirted more openly with erotic fiction. This was a speedier trial, and before Woodhull and Claflin appeared in court again he’d already won a conviction. This was a major case for Comstock: for one thing because Leslie published a newspaper that appeared on most newsstands and would have been thought reasonably respectable, not dirty books that had to be pulled from the back room; for another because it brought him national publicity. The fame and notoriety he’d earned from the Claflin case had made Comstock himself worth reporting on. He was becoming recognized as the leader of a new reform movement, the cleaning up of publishing.

      Comstock’s greatest work in the first months of 1873, however, were not in the courts of New York but in the congressional offices of Washington. He had become the lead proponent, and to some extent the lead author, of a sweeping bill to give the Post Office vast and unchallengeable authority not only to refuse to carry any material it judged obscene but to prosecute violators, with penalties including years of imprisonment. It also created the office of an official Post Office Inspector whose job it would be to catch filth passing through the system, to arrest perpetrators, and—unilaterally, even before they were judged guilty—ban their products from the mail. That would be a powerful post, because hardly any publication could survive without the mails. There were no networks of distributors then, no trucks to move material around, and most of the country’s population still lived in small towns or rural areas. The inspector’s findings could be overturned in court and the accused could return to the mails, but being banned from them even for a few months could be a commercial death sentence to many a publisher, and so the rage and whims of the nation’s postal inspector would be terrible indeed. Not surprisingly, Comstock hinted that he would available for the post, should the government see fit.

      Congress at that moment was reeling from revelations of scandal: many leading members of the legislature had been taking bribes from the construction company called Credit Mobilier, which was actually an arm of the Union Pacific Railroad and was revealed to have defrauded the nation of over a hundred million dollars through inflated, extortionary invoices. The newly reelected President Grant had been implicated as well, and suddenly any opportunity to stand up for decency and reform was seized upon in Congress, especially by the dominant Republican Party. The “Comstock Bill,” as it was already becoming known, sailed through both houses easily and became law on March 7, 1873. Surely no one was surprised when the Postmaster General chose Comstock as his Chief Inspector.

      Before Comstock could begin to take on his new duties, another opportunity arrived. In June, as most expected, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were found not guilty of sending obscene materials by mail. The case was done, and many member of the YMCA board expressed embarrassment at having been associated for so many months with such a dubious crusade. Comstock argued that the sisters would have been found guilty under the new law that he and the Association had just seen passed, but still the directors began to aver when he suggested they turn their energies to hunting new quarry, this time armed with their stricter law.

      Frustrated, Comstock spoke to some of his allies on the board and suggested that what the cause needed was a new organization, unattached to the YMCA or any other institution that might have reason to feel conflicted about the pursuit of smut. Within weeks, those men and several other prominent New York Protestants had come together to form the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It would have an ample budget and a full staff for the purpose of seeking out filth and the men behind it, then publicizing their findings, pushing New York’s city and state authorities to take action, and helping them build their case. As its first secretary and chief warrior, the new group chose Anthony Comstock.

      By the end of summer, Comstock was beginning his wave of arrests as special postal inspector and chief suppressor of vice. By the end of the year, he was already scoring convictions. The state of New York proved as eager to support him as had the national Congress, for it too had been thrown into upheaval by scandals—Boss Tweed was tried and convicted in the same summer that the Society was formed, laying bare years of blatant graft and corruption in New York city’s politics—and there too the reformers were taking charge, and few dared oppose them. The prosecutors and most judges of the city proved more than eager to win Comstock’s favor and hand him victories. They wanted to show the tide of sin being turned, especially by the Republican Party, and in one realm, the realm of publications, Comstock was a valuable ally. Almost immediately, newspaper and magazine editors began to clean up their product, and the dealers of more open smut drew deeper underground. Soon enough Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin had shut down their weekly and moved on to less risky pursuits.

      By the end of 1873, Anthony Comstock had made himself the chief censor of America, the embodiment of the dam that the old Protestant elite erected against the flood of words and pictures and ideas pouring from the new mongrel nation, a man of tremendous cultural power. He was not yet thirty years old. His reign promised to be a long one.

Next: enter Bernarr Macfadden...

Finding Your Story

This is a post I wrote for my friend Meghan Ward's terrifically informative Writerland blog. It's mainly about a class I teach at the San Francisco Writers Grotto called "Finding Your Story," but it also touches on a lot of the struggles and discoveries of writing the current book.

You know the line: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Never the favorite homily of those of us who write for a living and teach on the side. But I’ve developed my own version, and this one I’ll stand by: “Those who can’t do learn how to do...and then they’ve got something to teach.”

Some aspects of writing have always come easily for me: dialogue, pace, a generally smooth style. I entered this business with a kind of natural glibness, which in the early going I thought could carry me all the way. It took me years to realize—and even more years to admit to myself—that what didn’t come naturally for me was telling a story.

Oh, I was clever enough with structure and the mechanics of plot. I could outline with the best of them. But somehow my narratives, in both fiction and nonfiction, rarely had the forward drive they needed or came together with the symphonic inevitability I wanted. When it did happen, I never quite understood why; I could only step back and marvel at how a story had miraculously emerged from the sludge and found its own way to a satisfying ending. More often I had to dig my way to a reasonably satisfying ending through countless wrong turns and massive rewrites.

The books I read about story didn’t help much. I was getting screenwriting jobs for a while, so I became especially familiar with the geometric approach of how-to-write-a-movie books, all those three-act structures and juxtaposed A-plots and B-plots. The more I tried to use those, the more my stories came to feel like those wooden frames they use to build sidewalks, inert boxes waiting to be filled with concrete. (A lot of what they say isn’t even accurate; any savvy screenwriter can tell you that Hollywood runs on a four-act template, and why people insist on calling it three acts with a turning point in the middle of the extra-long second act I have no idea.)

The more I looked at the usual ways of breaking down a story, the less sense most of them made. What’s this “beginning, middle, and end” business? Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning and the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany? And what’s all this about the “character arc”? Why does a character have an “arc”? Does it go up in the middle and then back down? In a story of midlife fullness and senile decay it might, but that’s hardly every story. I don’t see my life as an arc. A line, a road, a river, or a tree, fine. But not a parabola.

So I started looking hard at how other writers made their stories work, “reading like a writer” and feeling for the sandbags and steel girders under the fascinating details and pretty prose. I started summarizing the most compelling and satisfying stories, and I found that with the best of them I could keep boiling them down, making them simpler and simpler, and they never lost their essence.

“A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until their nation is nearly destroyed by an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” A lot more happens along the way in War and Peace, but I never did catch Tolstoy losing touch with that core story.

That’s when I really understood (and it’s not like I’d never heard this, but I finally started to get it in a concrete, applicable way), that a story is not a plot, and it’s not a structure, and it’s not a series of concrete events. At its heart, every coherent story is a single event. A single transformation or revelation. It isn’t made up like a brick building of its component parts; its parts are manifestations and demonstrations of its essence. I discovered I could get pretty metaphysical about it, especially late at night after working too hard. But I also discovered I could find the heart of my own story through a series of exercises.

     The most important step always turned out to be understanding just what my story is. Who’s it about, what’s it about, what one big thing is happening, what I’m saying about people or the world. That turned out to be a lot harder than it sounds. The details of writing can be awfully distracting, not only for the reader but for the writer; I learned that I could write thousands of words of dramatic events about interesting people without ever fully understanding what I was trying to say—and without understanding that, I could never know just which events mattered or just how to tell them.

My work got better. It felt stronger, it got easier, and the world started telling me I was onto something. When your editor—a publishing veteran so tough she’s known in the business as “the Dragon Lady”—tells you that your final chapter brought tears to her eyes, and when you get Michael Chabon and Art Spiegelman calling your book “relentless” and “a constant delight,” you know you've found your story. Which meant a lot more to me than the praise I was accustomed to for my breezy dialogue and catchy voice; because for that I had to go at my own weak spots and make myself better. Like the difference between being six feet tall and being able to run eight miles.

That also gave me something to teach: exercises, tools, and tricks I could give to other writers wrestling with the same issues. Working with them has been teaching me far more than I ever learned on my own, because you can also turn that annoying comment on doing and teaching a different way: “Those who teach learn how to do.” But that, trust me, is another story.