REMEMBERING RAYMOND CARVER

January 4, 2010

            Stephen King’s New York Times’ front page review of Raymond Carver’s Collected Stories and Carol Sklenicka’s biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life brought back my memories of Ray in the mid-seventies when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa and he was a teacher.

            Ray was working on his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? but doing more drinking than writing.  In those days, students and teachers mingled intimately outside the classroom, and a strong common bond was alcohol.  As if an active student drinking body wasn’t enough, John Cheever lived above Ray at the Iowa House, and the two made a formidable tandem.

            Ray was courteous and kind.  Introduced to strangers, he furrowed his brow, made sure he got their names and asked what they did.  This was a quality in him everyone loved.  This was “Good Ray,” a label he gave himself.

            But his heavy drinking resulted in abusive behavior in his marriage, financial struggles and lost years.  In Iowa City, he always answered the phone in a disguised voice, fearing collection agencies.  Sklenicka refers to this time as “finding the bottom,” and that was a long way down for “Bad Ray.”

            One night he drove me home after a tour of the bars, and called the next day to ask if we had gotten into an accident.  When I said we hadn’t, Ray explained that his car was smashed in and wouldn’t start.  He didn’t remember hitting anything after he dropped me off, and said, “It was all I could do this morning to hail a cab and get Cheever and me to the liquor store.”

            Ray marked out his own territory, writing about those reckless acts and the people he knew best—the time-torn dreamers; the destitute, disgraced and floundering; the broken-up couples and broken-down men.  At nineteen, on his honeymoon, he told his new bride, Maryann, as they ate in a diner, that he would describe the lives of those around them, and he did just that, in a clear uncompromising way that captured their hardships without stealing their dignity. 

            Ray once told me a story that depicts his drinking life as well as a boozer’s misplaced indignation.

            He and his friend went out to dinner and ordered the special: a whole roast chicken.  They filled the water glasses from their own fifth of Jim Beam, ignoring the waitress who asked them to order from the bar.  The chickens were served, and the waitress warned them a second time.  They continued drinking until the manager arrived and an argument began.  Ray’s friend got so angry that he picked up the chicken and slammed it at the manager’s feet.  Ray ended the story by shaking his head with real consternation, saying, “John, that chicken stayed there on the rug all night.  That’s the kind of place it was.”

            I saw Ray many times over the next decades, in Dallas, Vermont, Cape Cod, and New York. 

            He came to Provincetown at my invitation in the early 80s for a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center, critiquing the fiction of the writing fellows.  He was sober and happy and beginning a new life as a teacher at Syracuse University.  The blurred vision of his alcoholic days had cleared.  His latest addiction was an innocent craving for Fiddle Faddle.

            After picking him up at the airport, I was showing him the Work Center’s humble offices when I noticed that my desk, a formica table, was stacked with boxes.  My girlfriend and I had recently broken up, and it seemed she had returned all the presents I’d given her during our time together.  I explained this to Ray who started peeking around, lifting up a leather purse and a music box from the Isle of Capri. 

            “Help yourself,” I said, as he continued to choose things for the new love in his life, Tess Gallagher.

            “Ray,” I asked,” Would you help me get this stuff into my car?”

            We carried the boxes out the door, a scene straight from his fiction.

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TRURO

January 11, 2010

            In 1992, when I bought a house in Truro, Cape Cod’s smallest town, there were three others on the street.  Today we are nearing build-out, with controversies about “trophy homes,” including an oceanfront mansion built where the American artist, Edward Hopper, lived and painted.

            In spite of that anomaly, Truro retains its character, with pristine beaches on the bay and ocean, and without chain restaurants or stoplights.

            Two years after moving here, I took a job in Boston, but decided to commute the one-hundred-seven miles.

            Why did I remain “out on that clam strip,” as a colleague put it?  Because my son was in our excellent public school; I still had friends from living here in the seventies, and I can step out the door to the National Seashore. 

            When Yankee pitcher Bob Lemon was asked if he brought his job home with him, he said, “No, I leave it as some bar along the way.”  That’s how I feel about getting back and walking the narrow trail that’s travelled by coyotes, foxes and occasional deer. 

            In the center of the path today is a doodle of coyote scat.  Rather than choose the surrounding acres of lichen, bayberry and bearberry, the author decided to sign here, a frank opinion of his neighboring home-owner.

            On Sylvan Lane, a dog is tied in her yard.  She refuses a milkbone.  She gets better things from the trash cans that lie just beyond her reach, and sometimes within her reach, where both wild and domestic animals feast.  One day a happy Labrador passed me carrying half a ham in his mouth.

            Sylvan Lane meets the trail to the seashore that rises above a large kettle hole, an expansive dip of brush and trees.  Moss known as old man’s beard curls on the branches.  With the leaves down, you can see beyond them.  William Blake wrote that we see “through the eye, and not with it,” and at this time of year, sight seems to penetrate even the opaque, as if you can stare into the infinite.

            I was not always a walker and hardly claim to know the natural world.  Thirty-five years ago, when I first arrived here in autumn, I was asked by friends to escort a nature writer through Provincetown’s Beech Forest which she wanted to see.  Where I grew up in Queens, our few fallen leaves disappeared by wind or broom.  I identified with the city dweller quoted by A. J. Liebling: “I like the country.  It is a nice spot.”

            As we kicked through the ankle-deep foliage, I said, “These leaves are still here.” 

            “I guess no one swept them,” she said.

            Another autumn, poet Stanley Kunitz and I walked the same trail.  A renowned gardener, Stanley named the bushes and shrubs, all mysteries to me.  After half an hour, to keep up my end of the conversation, I asked Stanley to identify a stunning crimson tree. 

            He drew out his two-syllable answer as if it was the saddest, most pathetic word that ever crossed his lips. 

            “Maple,” he said.

            As I approach the “Four Corners” crossroads, wind cascades through the pines and oaks with a sound I still mistake for an oncoming truck.  A soft branch breaks as I twist it aside, and it falls among the pine needles and trodden leaves.  Everything is decay over sand. 

            I often meet the same woman jogger here and we nod in passing.  But during last fall’s hunting season, she stopped, upset, to talk.  She had come upon a group of turkeys and, as they scattered across the road, her only thought was that they were in danger, and she worried for them as she jogged away.

            I was sure her story would end with a bloody description of wounded or fallen birds, but she said, obviously grieved, that soon after seeing the turkeys, she met two hunters, and something— she didn’t know what— prompted her to shout as she ran by, “There’s turkeys back there!”

            We guessed at the reason: a bond with man rather than the wild?  A secret sympathy she didn’t know she shared?  Creatures among creatures, we stood on the path and wondered.

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A LIFE STORY, TOLD IN KEEPSAKES

January 18, 2010

My Aunt Linda never married and lived downstairs from my parents and me in a row of attached homes known as railroad flats.  The daughter of Italian immigrants, she dropped out of high school and became a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square where she worked for forty years.  I remember her trying to improve her posture by walking through her apartment balancing The Complete Lives of the Saints on her head. 

She died in 1989, but last spring, sorting through my mother’s things after moving her to a retirement center, I discovered a box of Linda’s keepsakes which my mother had saved. 

A manila envelope contained a swizzle stick from P.J. Clarke’s, and matchbooks from Jack Dempsey’s and Il Vagabondo, a restaurant whose tables bordered a bocce court.  When I was fifteen, she got me a summer job in Paramount’s mailroom and we had lunch in those places on paydays.  At Schrafft’s, we sat in the “Men’s Grill,” a section off-limits to unescorted women.

Among the cards from funeral masses for relatives, I found her father’s obituary.  A roofer,  he “fell six stories from the National Sugar Refinery in New Jersey, landed on a railroad car filled with pig iron and was killed.” 

As a boy, I often went downstairs to visit Linda after dinner.  She sat at her dining room table, the Journal American spread out next to her coffee cup.  She read the obituaries aloud, instructively, saying, “Here’s something I’d like in my obituary: ‘finest wines.’”  She repeated this about “riviera” and “show jumping.”  Sometimes, she’d shake her head at a construction site catastrophe and say, “Reminds me of papa, falling into the pig iron.”  The last phrase confounded me, but as I grew older, I understood its gruesome ring.

She kept only one photo, that of prizefighter Tony Canzoneri, taken at a resort in the Catskills, where she vacationed each summer for a week.  Tony’s thick arms are folded across his knit shirt, his head tossed back in laughter, giving even more prominence to his well-pummeled nose.  Clipped to the picture is a newspaper column entitled, “Building a universe on the basis of a man’s slim remark,” in which the writer recounts falling for men who allured her with words.  As far as I knew, Linda had no romance in her life but it seems my prim aunt had a crush on the holder of three world titles.

How could I have forgotten this worn fortune-tellers deck?  Only now do I realize that love was the subject of her every forecast.  The life preserver signaled a voyage to or away from romance.  The bright engagement ring meant happiness.  The tea set, gossip.  She used to set up a folding table in the living room and predict the futures of our neighbors.  As she shuffled the deck, she insisted it had no bearing on the truth.  But if she turned the image of the pierced heart, she winced visibly, unable to stop herself from saying, “I hate to see that card!” and shaking the visitor to his core.

In the closet where my mother kept her brooms and mops was a spear Linda claimed was held by John Wayne in Hatari!  But her favorite Paramount souvenir, the bible Richard Burton carried in Beckett, and which she proudly displayed on an end table, was missing.

Here’s a post card I sent her from Dallas, where I moved for my first real job.  She had moved as well, into her own apartment.   My salary made me feel so flush that on Valentine’s Day I sent bouquets to her and my mother.  My mother loved the surprise, but the florist phoned me, troubled, as my aunt refused to open her door.  The more the delivery boy pleaded, the more certain she felt his words were a ruse to enter her apartment.  The florist reported her saying, “No one’s sending me any flowers.”  Going through these keepsakes, I realize how much I didn’t know about the woman who appeared only now through these yellow and torn fragments.

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TURNING SIXTY

January 25, 2010

            Two feet of snow fell a week after my sixtieth birthday, but I was prepared.  A few years ago I bought an eight hundred dollar snow blower so I could leave for work without the anxiety of waiting for the plow.

            I remember questioning the salesman about its durability.  He said his father had left him this same brand in his will. 

            I dug a path to the shed, where the blower refused to start.  I considered continuing to shovel, but had second thoughts when I faced the wide driveway.  Leaning over the machine once more, I recalled one of my birthday presents, a framed list of Chinese proverbs.  One said: It is better to struggle with a sick jackass than to carry the wood yourself. 

            The engine eventually kicked in but seemed heavier, harder to maneuver.  I remembered a friend warning me, “Don’t ruin the winter by hurting your back.”  And a few days earlier, my doctor balled me out for missing annual physicals.  He kept saying, “At your age…at your age…”

            When I bought the snow blower, I was so concerned about the machine’s endurance I forgot I’d be growing old along with it. 

            Two hours later, I was able to begin the hundred mile drive to pick up my son.

            I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts near home.  In Boston, I buy coffee and a bagel for $3.15 at the busy Tremont Street location, using exact change.  Out of habit, I handed this clerk that same amount.  She looked puzzled, took only the three dollars and returned a few coins.  I glanced at the register.  It said Senior Discount. 

            Earlier in the week discussion in my poetry class centered around a student poem that used the enigmatic words, “a bump, a key, a fingernail.”

            I soon learned they referred to cocaine, and my students continued to educate me about the phrase by repeatedly saying “our generation,” and “my generation.”  I refrained from saying it was The Who of my generation who sung “My Generation” with the lyrics we once loved: “I hope I die before I get old.” 

            I felt much like my former teacher in graduate school, Donald Justice, who flew into a rage over a series of careless typographical errors in student poems.  After giving us the ultimatum that he wouldn’t accept anything with a misprint, a student handed in a page with the line:

                                                I keep my bong in the closet…

Justice said that the poem would not be reviewed.  None of us could find the mistake and the author asked Justice what was wrong. 

            “You left the o off bongo!” he seethed.

            The worst and best part of turning sixty is that I don’t feel that age.  I feel as if someone has fitted me with a costume I can’t remove: a sixty-year old costume.  I wear a mask that wrinkles as the costume grows heavier, as if made of chain mail. 

            The day after conquering the snow and driving the hundred miles, I met a friend for lunch.  When I leaned slightly over the table to lift a turkey club sandwich, I was hit with a paralyzing pain, like a two-by-four to the spine, a seizure I recognized from summer, when I was mowing the lawn on the shady side of a tall privet hedge, and collapsed to the ground, prone and out of sight of the house, in the cool dark where mosquitoes like to dine. 

            I was able to leave the restaurant after lunch, but when I stood, vibrations like little mallet taps ran up my spine with the muffled sound of buttons popped from a shirt.  

            I walked stiffly, recalling another costume, the one worn by my small son years ago, on Halloween, when I sent him off as a robot after wrapping his entire body in silver duct tape. 

            Now twenty-three, he asked me when I got home, “You hurt your back lifting a sandwich?”

            I quoted another Chinese proverb, “It’s not the last blow of the axe that fells the tree.”

            But I was also thinking of my poetry class, and W. H. Auden’s line, “Time will say nothing but I told you so.”