Maplewoods
Mirror #9
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. The back issues are on the bottom of the
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“Excuse me,” said the stewardess to the couple across the aisle from us. “Would you mind switching with two gentlemen near the wing? They need to be close to the bathroom.”
We, those of us in the back of the 757, all heard it. What kind of sickness did these gentlemen have? We were on an afternoon flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. The couple vacated their seats, and the gentlemen, twenty-something gamer-looking geeks with stringy dark hair, squeezed in, smiled to their new curious neighbors, then sneezed a few times with the kind of spray an orange might give being hammered by a mallet. “Sorry,” one mumbled. “Darn cold.” We knew now what kind of sickness they had.
My wife, Ann, had the first symptoms, a cough, two days later. She zipped to the local drugstore, CVS, and discovered Sudafed was no longer on a shelf. You have to sign a form, even for one box, thanks to America’s love of amphetamines. The main ingredient, pseudoephedrine, is needed to make methamphetamine, and with plenty of ingredients from the local WalMart, illegal labs popped up all across the country in homes, barns, and even in national forests. This new law was designed to quell that. If you have a bad cold, the lawmakers figured, you’ll sign anything. Ann signed, came back, and took the pills as prescribed every four hours. Still, she looked mighty miserable, walking slowly, talking deeply like Lauren Bacall, and coughing often. The next morning, she could barely sit up in bed, so she stayed home from work.
I hadn’t caught the cold on the plane, so I figured my immune system was in high gear. A week later, I was coughing, walking slowly, and talking deeply like Lauren Bacall. This wasn’t the time for a cold. I happened to be teaching English in an intensive six-week session, meeting daily for two hours. I also had two creative writing classes in the graduate Professional Writing Program at USC, a fiction class at UCLA Extension, and a children’s-book-writing class at Art Center. I would endure a cold. I had to.
I don’t remember colds ever being this bad before. Did pigeons from India deliver not the bird flu but the bird cold? When I walked, my muscles ached. My voice went from Bacall to Bogie in short order. Soon I was Tom Waits after smoking and singing all night. My sneezes were as bad as the geeks on the plane, spraying like Krakatoa if I didn’t get a napkin from my pocket in time. (Ever try to stop a sneeze? The one and only time I tried, I think I strained every muscle in my neck, and my head must have swelled like the ground after an underground nuclear test.) My sinuses felt like they had two rolls of double ply stuffed up them, and my wife complained that I made nasal sounds like some kid named Jeff Rudge in her third grade class. No one wants to be snot-swallowing Rudge.
Like all good and driven people of my generation, I, too, zipped to the local drugstore. Sudafed alone wouldn’t be enough. For my sore throat and cough, I scanned for the strongest cough drop and found one about the size on a hockey puck marked “Ultra Throat Lozenges.” It promised maximum relief from sore throat pain. That and “Ultra Cough/Cold Syrup”—non drowsy, non-psudeoephedrine (is that a good thing?), and on special, two bottles for one—should do it.
Once I reached the car, I cracked open a bottle of the cough/cold syrup, and measured two ounces of the bright red syrup into the little plastic cup provided. I looked around, feeling this was a little out there. This was legal medicine, but yet doing it in a car felt like, I don’t know, like I was in a clip on 60 Minutes, a heroin addict of Amsterdam shooting up in a park. However, I could feel a sneeze coming on. I drank my two ounces without further thought, and, miracle of miracles, not only did my sneeze run away like a rat into a palm tree, but my nose cleared quickly as happens with too much wasabi with a piece of sushi—but this syrup had none of the sting. I looked carefully at the label for side effects. I could still drive heavy machinery. While I was at it, I popped one of the puck-sized drops into my mouth and in short order, my entire mouth was numb. I was ready to teach. First I had to return home for my books.
“What brand is that?” asked Ann, when I arrived home pointing to the word “Ultra” on the cough drop box with a smile.
“Ith the whore bwan” I managed to get out, my mouth and now tongue being totally numb. The great thing: earlier my throat that had felt like a Roto Rooter guy had scraped away all inside skin with a swirling snake. Now I had relief at last. In fact, I could have oral surgery or piercings in and around my mouth and neck, and I’d be fine. This was one strong drop.
“And you’re now going to teach?” she asked.
I nodded. I had a night class. “I heal ellee ellee uch etter ow.” Yikes. I realized I better not take another one of these drops until after class.
Once I arrived on the USC campus, though, I didn’t feel like leaving the car. What none of these drugs brought was energy. I wasn’t sleepy, but I wasn’t eager to stand in front of a class for three hours, being fast on my feet. I felt like zoning out on a Sponge Bob Marathon. This is where Starbucks needed to come to the rescue: coffee, strong, bold, rich, caffeinated.
It worked, aided by getting even more coffee at the break. Of course, when I arrived home at 10:30 p.m., I couldn’t sleep, thanks to too much coffee. As I lay in bed, listening to Ann sleep—peaceful, rhythmical, gentle sleep that mocked me, “Ha, ha, you can’t sleep”—I coughed, and coughed so hard, Ann awoke blurting “Earthquake!” One of the joys of living in California is that any unusual movement surely has to be an earthquake. My coughing had shaken the bed hard. Once on the freeway as our car spun out of control, I thought it was thanks to an earthquake until I saw the grill of a Mack truck—but that’s another story.
“Sorry,” I told Ann. “I’ll take some more medicine and a cough drop.”
“Okay,” she said, and drifted back to sleep as if all the sheep were in her field. I drank two more ounces of Ultra and popped in a drop. To my delight, the cough ceased and I felt sleepy soon. I slipped back into bed, the drop still in my mouth. It occurred to me I could sleep with the drop in my mouth if I kept the drop in my cheek and my teeth shut. That way it would work double-duty. How we talk ourselves into the oddest things. It occurred to me, the drop could lodge in my throat and cut off my air. Still, I felt sleepy, and I was sure I could keep the drop in my cheek. I would live.
Indeed, I lived, though I woke in the morning to the bed shaking violently. “Earthquake!” I screamed and sat up.
Quick aside: What are you supposed to do in an earthquake anyway besides act panicked and scream “Earthquake”? Maybe you’re supposed to do as I was taught in second grade in case of nuclear attack—put your non-writing arm over your head to protect yourself. In case a beam fell on you, you still had the writing arm to write a note, such as, “Help me. I’m under the beam.”
Anyway, I found Ann laughing hard, and it was her shaking the bed with laughter that had awoken me. She was pointing to my head. I felt my head with my writing hand and soon came across something hard encrusted in my hair. It was a dried and round and puck-like—the cough drop. I noticed, too, my pillow was full of what must have been drool.
Ann shook her head with a loving smile. “You’re Jeff Rudge.”
I have this vision that being a writer is about being in a large auditorium, giving a preface to a story that makes people laugh. The writer reads the story, and people are moved by it and nod in a way that says, “Now there’s a writer.” The fact is, this writer is the guy with the cough drop in his hair.
Lulu Books, which happens to be the company that prints and distributes my books The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Who Lives? has started something new called Lulu Radio—interviews with Lulu authors. While the company prints hundreds of new titles per week, Lulu only interviews an author every few weeks. I’m the twentieth interview. You can get my interview by going to Lulu at http://lulu.libsyn.com/. Yahoo Podcasts also has it also at
http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?s=a8b881f00165b765a130c33cf44ce4b1
You can also get it from the iTunes Store for free if you do a search. Wherever you get it, listen to me chat not only about some of the inspirations for these books but for my novel, The Laughter and Sadness of Sex—the next book up, I hope.
Perhaps the best and most helpful instruction I ever received for becoming a narrative writer was in becoming a reviewer. One of my professors at USC, the late Tommy Thompson, who at the time was an extremely popular author (Blood and Money, Serpentine, Celebrity), encouraged me to submit to the local paper a book review I’d written for him. “Write a good letter and give this review as a sample,” he said. The local paper, the Daily News¸ immediately hired me to review books and interview authors. My first interview was Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds) and the second was Chaim Potok (The Book of Lights, The Chosen). I later reviewed for a bigger paper, which evolved into reviewing theatre for Daily Variety for much of the nineties. Reviewing honed my ability to see what worked well, what didn’t, and then explain that in a meaningful way to readers. Interviewing perhaps helped me connect to writing in another way by seeing and asking writers nearly anything I wanted. How did they get to where they did? They wrote. Daily.
My goal in reviewing was to encourage more books and more plays. I did not take the bitingly sarcastic route, calling attention to myself while slashing writers dead in their tracks. I understand how hard it can be to write meaningful reviews that flow well. Hence, when I come across good reviews, I celebrate it. If you’re a writer and want to improve, I encourage you to review. Perhaps the easiest place to start is writing customer reviews on Amazon.com. Start with any book you like and explain to readers why it’s good and how the author achieves his or her effects. Support yourself by quoting from the text.
For examples of this, look what Grady Harp and Adam Daniel Mazei wrote on Amazon for my books. Scroll down for customer reviews. For The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Middle-Aged-Man-Sea-Christopher-Meeks/dp/1411647610/sr=1-1/qid=1170781185/ref=sr_1_1/002-7181215-4735206?ie=UTF8&s=books
For Who Lives?, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Lives-Christopher-Meeks/dp/1847283756/sr=1-2/qid=1170781234/ref=sr_1_2/002-7181215-4735206?ie=UTF8&s=books
Harp and Mazei have deeply different styles (click next to their names on Amazon to see other reviews they’ve written), but each clearly shows his passion while giving specifics. I’ve never met these gentleman, but I truly appreciate what they do. They don’t write, “I like it. It’s really really good. It’s great.” Heck, I’ll take reviews like that, too, but what I’m talking about takes time. It takes underlining while you read (which I encourage my students to do—be interactive with your books. Mark similes and metaphors that you wish you wrote; bracket description that says much is a little space; highlight meaningful sentences). It takes editing and rewriting to get what you want to say exactly as you mean it. As you hone those skills, you’ll see you can look at your own work more deeply and objectively. Writing is such a subjective art, one that requires instinct, too, but there’s a lot of craft involved, and reviewing can get you there.
For those of you who’ve loved San Francisco for all things
alternative, and you enjoy your news online, try San Francisco’s alternative
online daily, Beyond Chron. I
learned of it shortly after the last Maplewoods Mirror went out, when it
ran my article, “Print-on-Demand Books: A Guide to How to Get Your Book to More Than
Just Friends and Family.” To see that or today’s
news, go to http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3979
I’m happy to say the move to a new house went well. We now live in Highland Park on a hill, and shortly after we moved, we put our townhouse up for sale. Buying a new place first and selling the old place second isn’t for the faint of heart, I’ve learned. You pay double mortgages and double taxes for a while for an uncertain future. Then again, we were able to clean and show the old place without cats, dog, and kids working their magic in a swirl behind us. Buying, moving, and selling requires such attention to detail and hundreds of calls with one’s real estate agent, that I had little time to write. I have a bigger office, so what the heck, and we got rid of the old Jello and funny foods in the back of cupboards. (Moving is great for editing.) Now I’m back to work on my next novel. I hope to be in a rhythm with this newsletter again, too.
I wish you the best for 2007.