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The
Maplewoods Mirror #20 (November 2007--Part Two )
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for back issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
This morning we awoke to thick fog outside the window. The air
was cool and moist. On Friday, we awoke to the drone of many
helicopters and saw four hover at the top of the hill. I
figured they were news helicopters, so I turned on the TV and saw five of
our neighbors’ homes on fire. A mysterious blaze had started in a
house under construction, and the thick vegetation on the hill then caught
fire. Life in California always seems to be about contrasts.
In This Issue:
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND
As I mentioned in the last letter, I went to Bruce Springsteen and
the E Street Band on October 30th. As I write this, two new concerts
in Anaheim went on sale yesterday and the first sold out. If you want
to see Springsteen, there are still tickets for the Tuesday, April 7th show
at 7:30 p.m. That night I’m teaching a UCLA class, “Writers’
Workout,” trying my best to inspire others as Springsteen has inspired me.
I remember the moment I first heard his music. I was in
Denmark, having just broken up with my Danish girlfriend, living with her
parents until the spring semester started. (Yes, that was
awkward.) I was in a special American program at the University of
Copenhagen and would get a Danish family to live with. A few nights
before the semester started, a meet-your-classmates event was setup in a
downtown disco—when discos were still around—and an American girl went up
to the DJ with an album, Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent, and
the E Street Shuffle. The DJ agreed to play a song.
The song was “New York City Serenade,” which was around eleven
minutes long, lyrical, and as anti-disco as could be. I was
entralled. Springsteen pleads at one point, “Fish lady, oh fish lady
/ She baits them tenement walls / She won't take corner boys /They ain't got
no money / And they're so easy.” I didn’t know what it meant, but it
caught my imagination. When I returned to America at the end of that
summer and Born to Run was released, I bought it, and I’ve been
hooked on his music ever since.
And I’ll tell you why. He’s followed his passion (music), and
he’s followed his curiosity; he listens and observes. In thirty-five
years of music, he’s grown many ways as an artist, and he’s not out for
mere fame. He lives. He’s not afraid to upset his fans by going
solo and acoustic and exploring dark subjects. He’s not afraid to
return to rock-and-roll, either. He keeps on writing and composing
and touring.
With his latest album, Magic, some people think he’s shaken
politics from his shoulders and returned to a feel-good time. The
first track, “Radio Nowhere,” indeed rocks and makes you move, but it’s
also a narrative about a person trying to find a foothold in his life with
music and finding nothing.
While the word “Iraq” isn’t mentioned, I found the subject of war in
a few songs, including “Devil’s Arcade.” In fact, I stared at the
lyric sheet for a long time until “Devil’s Arcade” made sense. It’s
about two young lovers making love for the first time. The young man
then goes to war and in “the cool desert morning” he gets injured and has
“just metal and plastic” where his body caved. He comes home and his
girlfriend says, “Don’t worry, I’m here,” and he dreams of how his life
could have been.
“Gypsy Biker” is about a young man who does not come back from war,
and “the whole town’s been rousted—which side are you on?” The former
biker’s friends shine up the man’s motorcycle and take it into the
foothills where they burn it much like a Viking funeral (my Danish
influence there.)
The title song, “Magic,” on the surface seems to be about standard
magic tricks, such as sawing someone if half, but if you listen closely,
you may see George W. Bush in such lines as, “You’re smiling ear to ear,
and the freedom that you sought’s drifting like a ghost among the trees.
This is what will be.”
“Last to Die” is unambiguous. One line in particular lays it
out: “Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break? Who’ll be the
last to die for a mistake?”
His drive and passion motivate me. Even as he’s approaching
sixty, neither age nor riches are slowing him down. I don’t want to
slow down, either.
---
To read a couple of great reviews of his album, go to Counterpunch and
Muzik Reviews.
If you want to see the set lists for his current tour and see a
number of videos from various cities, go to www.brucespringsteen.net.
On the night I saw him, the evening began with six hooded figures
carrying a casket on stage. From the casket, a hand emerged, and one
of the figures places a guitar in the hand. Springsteen then stepped
from the casket and started to play “Radio Nowhere.” To see that
clip, click
here.
(The clips on the site take a while to load, but be patient.)
From the website, I also grabbed the list of the 23 songs he and the
band played that night:
Radio Nowhere { lyrics }
{ video clip }
The Ties That Bind { lyrics
}
Lonesome Day { lyrics }
Gypsy Biker { lyrics }
Magic { lyrics
}
Reason To Believe { lyrics
}
Night { lyrics
}
She's The One { lyrics }
Livin' In The Future { lyrics
}
The Promised Land { lyrics
}
Town Called Heartbreak
Tunnel Of Love { lyrics }
Working On The Highway { lyrics
}
Devil's Arcade { lyrics }
The Rising { lyrics
}
Last To Die { lyrics
}
Long Walk Home { lyrics }
Badlands { lyrics
}
Girls In Their Summer Clothes { lyrics
}
Kitty's Back { lyrics } {
video clip } Tour Premiere
Born To Run { lyrics
}
Dancing In The Dark { lyrics
}
American Land { lyrics }
FICTION
I thought I'd introduce the story
below. When I was a student in USC’s Master of Professional Writing
Program, playwright Jerome Lawrence had come to teach. I took his
master class in drama, and the class sometimes met at his Malibu home.
He and his writing partner, Robert E. Lee, first came to prominence with Inherit
the Wind, taking a real life situation and making it their own.
They later wrote and had produced more than twenty more major plays
including Mame and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. I
was writing and selling articles as I went to grad school, specializing in
author interviews. Thus I interviewed Jerry Lawrence and Bob Lee for
a Writer’s Digest article, which later landed in the book, On
Being A Writer, edited by Bill Strickland.
With the fires in Southern California this summer and recently, I
was reminded of Jerry and his home. I wrote this story in the spirit
of Lawrence and Lee. It will be a part of my new short story
collection, Months and Seasons, coming out next June. If you
have reactions to this story, I’d love to hear from you.
THE OLD TOPANGA INCIDENT
You awake. The sun throws a hue
as yellow as a butterfly fish that alights on your bedcover, and you think
what a lovely Malibu day. You stayed up far later than usual,
tweaking your play, and now it’s after eleven a.m. You sit up in bed
and feel young again.
Through your window, you see the
ocean dramatically below, waves lolling to the beach in front of the
seafood restaurant. You laugh because you remember when Tennessee
Williams had slept in your guestroom and had woken you up when he’d seen
this same view. “Die, you fucking L.A. sunlight!” he’d screamed at the
unshaded windows. Tennessee had hated good weather. How horrible he
died choking on a bottle cap in his hotel room. Then again, he’d been
the master of the dramatic moment.
Lucky, you think, that you have a bit
of Tennessee left in your signed first editions of his plays. They
stand next to signed books from your friends Dorothy Parker, Somerset
Maugham, Lillian Hellman, and others. You flip open the covers to
your bed and stand smiling. It’s always a joy to wake up with work to
do. Today would be a good day to finish your new play, a story of
Anton Mesmer and the powers of the mind. You move closer to the
window to see the sun through a yellowish haze.
Last night after dinner, you’d
watched the news, which said a high-pressure zone had centered over Nevada
and Northern Arizona and had butted up against a low-pressure Southern
California coastal. Hot desert air was flowing toward the ocean—the
famous Santa Ana winds. But it’s November. You look out again
at the ocean and think the worst of the summer has passed. The winter
rains should start any day. What was the haze—smoke?
You hurry upstairs, move past the
Steinway piano that Vladimir Horowitz had played one evening, past the
Picasso and the Hirschfeld drawings based on characters from your
plays. You zip up the circular staircase to the front door and pass
the three theatre seats you installed on the balcony from a torn-down
Broadway theatre. You pass a mirror and catch the reflection of a
white-haired man in a robe, rounder in the middle than you wished. It
doesn’t seem like you. It doesn’t seem like the guy you remember
being, but you’re seventy-eight. The many friendly books in the
built-in shelves assure you you’re fine.
You throw open the tall front doors,
a set worthy of King Louis XVI if he were to show up. Across the
driveway next to your Mercedes, you see lush green trees sway in the warm
breeze—instantly comforting. Nothing’s burning nearby. On the
ground, colorful lupine, Canterbury bells, and fine daisies move as if from
a wave of a Japanese fan. It’s why you call it Walden West—a lush and
safe two-acre sanctuary fed by the moist ocean breezes.
A particularly loud dove coos.
You can’t see the bird, but the sunlight, ah, the sunlight, as gorgeous as
a red-tail hawk on a thermal. You look into the azure sky and see at
last a column of smoke visible far beyond Las Flores Canyon.
Maybe it’s in the Valley. You
hear a bark and notice your neighbor, a young blond trophy wife who walks
her black poodle.
“Good morning!” you say and
wave.
“Hey,” she says. “Good
morning,” and she comes down your drive, hair bouncing on her bare
shoulders as you walk toward her. Is Nichole her name? Or is it
Lisa? You don’t remember, but you do what you do with your students,
which is simply avoid names altogether.
“Looks like there’s a fire,” you say.
“Really?” she says, picking up her
dog and holding it like a cat.
“Up there,” and you point.
She looks and nods. “So that’s
why I heard sirens earlier. Can the fire spread down here?”
“Doubtful,” you say. “Fires
like to go uphill, and we’re far down. Plus people’ve been keeping
the hillsides trimmed. Too many green things around here.” You
picture an image from the Rodney King riots a year earlier of liquor stores
burning. No liquor stores stand nearby. You will be fine.
She smiles and comes closer.
“The wind is so warm,” she
says. “It’s not from the ocean. Is it from the fire?”
“Santa Anas,” you reply.
“Raymond Chandler once wrote that they caused fights, and meek little wives
felt the edges of carving knives and looked at their husbands’ necks.
Do you have any carving knives?” You give a wink.
“My husband’s neck is just fine,” she
laughs. “And you think I’m meek? God no. Only my little
puppy here is, aren’t you, Dulce?” The dog barks as if on cue.
“She’s such a brat.” The svelte bride kisses the black poodle right
on the mouth. Disgusting.
“How sweet,” you say.
“My husband reminded me of a play you
wrote. You’re one of those agnostic writers who gives fundamentalists
conniption fits.”
“Yes. I hope.”
“You don’t believe in God?
There’s something wrong with the religious faithful?”
You can only laugh and shake your
head. “No, no. There’s definitely a divine spirit around.
He helps me write.”
Now she laughs and shakes her head as
if you’re playing with her.
“Truly,” you say. “I believe in
the creative mind of the universe. We’ve been created by that
intelligence to create and re-create.” You realize you sound as silly
as Mesmer did explaining animal magnetism to his critics. “I’m a
vessel,” you offer. “All creative people are. You listen to the
sounds of the universe and let them flow through you.”
You both remain quiet for a moment,
listening. The gentle music of chimes tinkle from the tree where you
hung the gift. You also notice the hibiscus at the edge of the
driveway has exploded into immense red blooms.
“So you’re saying God flowed through
you and made you write about doubting God?” she asks. She looks
serious.
“If you believe God made everything,
then he made disbelievers, agnostics, and scientists, too. He won’t
mind that I doubt him.”
“I know your play,” she says.
“You resent the faithful. You make fun of God.”
“Never,” you say. “Only the
bullies who think they’re God.”
“You think Jerry Falwell is a bully?”
“Of course. Isn’t this a battle
between reason and superstition?”
“I happen to think if you’re not
faithful, you’re missing something,” she says. Is that pity on her
face?
“I’m quite faithful to my
writing. Let me put it this way, I believe in the dignity of every
individual mind, and people must spend their lives battling limitation and
censorship.”
“Dulce needs her walk,” she
says. “Nice to see you.”
“You, too,” you say, knowing you’ve
just been dismissed. “Well, if it’s going to be a hot day, best to
stay inside.”
“How true,” she says and you part,
picking up the newspaper by the front door that has already yellowed in the
sun. A color photo of flowers on a sidewalk stands next to the
headline, “Autopsy Reveals Little on Death of River Phoenix.” How
sad. A talented actor—only twenty-three. Maybe drugs. You
note another smaller headline, “Scars From Firestorm Keep Oakland on
Constant Vigil,” and you scan it. In a 1991 Oakland Hills fire, many
factors worked against containment, including much dry vegetation.
You look up at your hillside—perfectly green. It’s a gorgeous day
minus the pesky fire somewhere. They’ll have it out in no time.
You have a quick brunch, an omelet
you make for yourself with onions and fresh garlic. An avid bachelor
for your whole life, you know how to cook, even though some nights you have
a cook come in more for the company than anything—not that you’re
lonely. You write with a partner and have a rich social life.
You have your trysts.
After you clean off your plate, one
that you bought on a trip to Mexico, you work at your large desk in your
office, using a pen on printed-out pages. You were slow to come to
use a computer, but it’s a new age and you have the hang of it, a
dependable Kaypro computer. You hear more sirens, probably the Malibu
fire department going to help in the Valley. You don’t notice the sky
getting even darker. You want to rewrite five pages. Five pages
a day is important.
At around 1:30 p.m., your doorbell
rings and rings, and someone pounds on it, too, as if they’re being chased
by a mob. God damn it—can’t people be patient anymore? “Hold
your horses,” you shout as loudly as you can as you walk up the
stairs. Don’t people understand this is how working writers work?
You open the door and you see a
number of things simultaneously: two firemen in bright yellow
rubberized coats stand before you, shouting, “You’ve got to get out
now!” Two hundred yards up the hill is a wall of flame, and the house
of the svelte woman with the dog burns brightly as if it were made of
gasoline. Flames shoot high. Embers the size of your fist land in the
juniper and cypress trees in your yard, on your car, in the driveway.
You stammer, “I need to pack first.”
“You can’t!” shouts the fireman in
front of you, who grabs your arm.
“I need my passport and my play,” you
say, breaking away and running down the stairs. The fireman follows
you shouting, “Sir, you have to leave now. You only have
minutes. This is a monster.”
You race down two flights with him
clomping behind shouting “Sir!” and you grab the play, the only copy, a
clump of pages. You find your passport inside the top drawer, and two
bankbooks, too. You clutch and run, returning upwards. Everything
you pass you realize you’ll never see again—the beautiful wood floors, the
art, the china, the crystal vases, the photo albums, the rough drafts, the
letters from your mother, and the books inscribed by all your
friends. You consider staying there and dying with your things, but
the fireman shouts, “Hurry!”
Outside, the driveway swirling in
smoke looks covered in gray snow, and the sharp smoky air tears at your
throat. You cover your mouth as you cough. The tops of trees
where embers landed now burn. Things weren’t as green as you
thought. The fire engine on your street shoots water at the house
immediately above yours whose interior is ablaze. How did you not
know this was happening? How could it possibly happen?
You will learn later that the fire
had been first reported on the other side of the hill in the morning near
the water tower on Old Topanga Road. The fire spread from one acre to
two hundred acres in ten minutes and to a thousand acres in sixty.
It’s a firestorm with its own eddies and its own convection column that
spirals some six miles into the sky. All the while, you had been
blissfully editing, completely unaware of your destiny outside your
door. The convection column draws oxygen unimpeded from the Pacific,
force-feeding the fire with incredible power, three-thousand degrees
Fahrenheit. Flame lengths of nearly two-hundred feet will be
reported. Three hundred and eighty-eight homes will burn down; 565
firefighters will receive injuries. This is a fire like no
other. It will burn your home as easily as a match.
“Thank you!” you shout even though
the firemen are not likely to hear you, and you get in your car; it starts,
and you drive. You can feel your heart pound, and you’re getting
light-headed. This isn’t what someone your age should be doing.
You zoom up the drive and down the hill, orange flickering in your
rear-view mirror, and hand-grenade-sized embers still falling around
you.
You speed up to other cars working
their way out, and you shout, “Keep going, keep going.” You make it
to the Pacific Coast Highway, where a policeman directs you to the left,
toward Santa Monica. Where are you headed? What should you
do?
You can’t quite grasp the loss
yet. You’re glad you’ve made it out of there.
You drive as if in a dream.
Maybe the firemen will save your house. You have hope. Maybe
they’re making your street the one they fight back on. Later that afternoon
as you watch the news from your hotel room, you recognize the silhouette of
your house on fire. You fall back into bed and imagine your life with
nothing. Gone are the boxes and boxes of photos in your garage that
you’d been meaning to sort. Gone are all your journals you wrote from
trips to over one hundred countries. You remember a line from one of
them: “Here I am with another freak typewriter with the keys all
reversed.” People always called you optimistic, but you now realize
you can’t stay that way. Too much of life is freaky. Life is a
bunch of obstacles, and why can’t the obstacles stop?
Your writing partner used the words
“divine intervention,” describing how plays sometimes just came to the two
of you. You said, “divine help, you mean.”
“That’s not the meaning I’m after,”
he said. “God influences life by intervening in the course of action,
positively or negatively. Art is a collaboration with the divine.”
“I agree with you in principle, but
not the word ‘intervention.’ I’m being anti-semantic,” you quipped.
Now you’ve just experienced an
intervention, a negative one. Fire happened. Divine
intervention isn’t the term. It’s divine indifference.
Two days later when you return to
your home, you are a passenger in a car driven by your niece, mid-thirties
and steady. You move through the moonscape of your valley. None
of the usual landmarks are there, and the whole area is eerily gray.
Most trees and telephone poles are bent black fingers pointing accusingly
upward. Melted, twisted shells of cars lie here and there in what had
been driveways or garages. Blackened foundations stand. Rock
black gray, you think.
You turn a particular corner, and you
peer. Where your house was is now open to the view; the ocean
serenely blue roils below. You get out of the car. A photographer
moves in on a blackened post where the front door used to be, and a
reporter from the Times who you’d spoken with on the phone waits
while a few firemen in yellow douse hot spots on your property. The
reporter will want to know what catastrophe means to you. In another
era, you might have come up with a quip, such as ashes to ashes but this is
your whole life gone. He will ask, “How you do feel? What was
it like?” You wonder now why you agreed to this. You can be a
role model. If you can make it through this, others can make it
through their tragedies. Everyone has them. But can you make it
through this?
“Hello, sir,” says the reporter,
early forties, long hair, and he shakes your hand as you get out.
“How do you feel?”
“Let me look it over first,” you
say. “Then we’ll talk.” You spoke this morning to your writing
partner. He lives in the Valley with his family, safe in his house,
but he’s sick. His liver transplant from a few years ago may not be
doing well. You consider how you’re not doing well, either. Was
this God getting back at you two? No, all your neighbors lost their
homes, even the faithful.
You don’t want to play any
parts. You don’t want to play. You just want your house back
with your stuff.
“Hello, sir,” says the photographer,
a thin man with a shock of blue hair. “I’m a great fan of your
plays.”
“Thank you,” you say but can’t
smile. You see a three-story hole near the edge of the driveway,
which is the space of your former home. The circular stairs that had
taken you downstairs to your rooms has twisted and melted in the heat like
an avant-garde statue. You’ve been liquefied and lost yourself.
“You want to leave?” your niece asks
you, and you realize how much like your late sister she appears, long dark
hair, beautiful chin. “You don’t have to do this in front of these
people. It’s just a story.”
“A story is everything,” you
say. “Especially mine.” You walk forward, proudly, down to
where the pool had once been, and you think of the conversation you had
with your neighbor about God.
“What are you going to do?” asks the
reporter.
“I’ll rebuild.”
“For it to burn again?”
“I’ll rebuild with concrete. I
want an unburnable house. It’ll be for future playwrights.”
“What about all the irreplaceable
things you had?”
Are you supposed to cry? You
notice a lump in the ashes and realize from the stone headdress that it’s
your pre-Columbian statue, a blackened fierce warrior. You pick it
up, dust it off, and see its arms have fallen off. “Now it really
looks pre-Columbian,” you mumble. The statue was once Charles
Laughton’s. You let it drop. You know in that instant your life
is over—but not a quick ending like Tennessee’s. Yours is the start
of a slow erasure.
The reporter stares at you—expects,
perhaps, more of your famous optimism, now burnt like the support
beams of your house.
You turn to the reporter and say, “I
saved our next play from the inferno, and I want to move on it. You
look at tomorrow, not yesterday.” You hope to say it again and
again. You need to believe. You just want to sleep.
EXPANDED BOOKS AND OTHER VIDEOS
At the West Hollywood Book Festival this summer, I was on a panel
moderated by Carolyn Howard-Johnson (The Frugal Book Promoter) about
the future of books and promotion in this Internet age. Yesterday, I
was reminded of one fun way to see new books: Expanded Books
(www.expandedbooks.com), which are videos. These are not mere
interviews, but pieces conceived to be visual, too. One video, for the
novel, Who Moved My Blackberry?, by British author Lucy Kellaway, is
particularly funny. I ended up buying the book. Click
here for the video.
Christmas book ideas, anyone? Click here to see my
video for my book The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, now on
YouTube.
While I was on YouTube, I found this
fablously funny piece about the Writers Strike from a producer’s
point-of-view: click
here.
THE GREAT LEAP INTO A MASTER’S DEGREE
I occasionally get e-mails from readers asking about writing groups
and writing classes. Writing is not a solitary sport. If you’re
writing to be published or produced, you need trusted people to read your
work before you send it off for consideration—people to keep egg off your
face.
One way to find those people is to join a writing group. Many
authors, including Janet Fitch and Jessica Barksdale Inclan, for instance,
are members of writing groups. It’s also a way to keep your critical
abilities sharp and alive.
Another way is to take writing classes. For affordability,
there’s UCLA Extension, which
offers over 500 campus and online writing classes each year. It’s
where I learned how to write magazine articles and short fiction.
Then there is the big leap for a master’s degree in creative
writing. At the right college, it’s a place where you’ll get your
worked critiqued often and where you’ll learn new approaches. After I
had earned my BA in psychology and mass communication for the University of
Denver, I headed west. Desperate for a job, I first took one working
at a camera store, which led to owning and running a mini-mart in a trailer
park in Alabama, which led to selling tile at Color Tile back in Los Angeles.
I was writing wherever I was, but publishing wasn’t happening. I took
a chance and applied to UCLA and USC. I chose USC’s Master of
Professional Writing Program (MPW).
I’m glad I did. A month before I received my USC degree, I
landed a job as a book editor, which led to a writing job at CalArts, which
led to my writing plays and getting them produced, which led to my short
stories being published, which led to books. I have an agent and am
writing novels. I'm also teaching in the MPW program now. If you want to
learn about story structure or writing short fiction, come take my classes.
If you believe in yourself and your writing, what's stopping you from
applying to any program?
USC’s MPW program (http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/mpw/) offers classes in six
fields–fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, writing for film and television,
and poetry. You can take classes in a mixture of fields, but you
write a thesis for one. If you have talent and interest, go fill out
the application online at the above address. While there is an official
December 1 deadline, if you have a great writing sample and fill in the
application blanks, you can make it into the spring semester. There are
still some spaces.
POST-MAYO CLINIC
Since I last wrote, my mother, who had open-heart surgery in
September, moved from the recovery floor to the rehabilitation floor where
she had three sessions daily with a physical therapist. I flew to
Minnesota two weekends in a row to see her there. It was great to see
her smile at last. She was learning to walk with a walker. She
has little stamina, but maybe in a month, she’ll just need a cane, When her
muscle strength is completely back, she’ll need no assistance. Below
is a photo of the gym there.
I was deeply impressed with the therapists who were so patient with
everyone. I soon learned that over half the people I saw were
recovering from traffic accidents—a part of our culture we don’t see.
One young woman, sixteen, had a hard time standing as well as holding up
her shaved head. She could only speak in grunts. My mother’s
doctor said spinal cord and head injuries were at the top of the list of
what they treat there.
Last Tuesday, my mother went home after a full two months in the
hospital.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING.
See
you next time,
--Chris
For
reviews or more information on either of my two books below, click on the
cover.
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