Lay of the Land
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
The writing won’t let me go on good nights. Not every night is that way. I was up after 1 last night. I started in about midnight, hoping my thumbs could put together something beautiful on my BlackBerry. I felt I owed my handheld a little literary brilliance since I occasionally use it type out my thoughts in a way that would send my former writing instructors into therapy (What r u waiting 4?) Granted, I usually got through the trouble of spelling everything out, but on the rare instance that I butcher my thoughts with symbols that rival Prince album liner notes, those few instances are egregious enough to be made up. Before closing my eyes for the night, I came up with an idea to map my childhood, to literally chart the people and places where I grew up but without using a legend or latitude and longitude lines. Instead, I’d use words – describe the settings and told about the people the way they were then. Below is what I came up with in about 45 minutes. Largely unedited, you can see here what a decent first draft looks like (I hope.) Mozart’s first drafts were near perfection. This is certainly not close to that. (More notes follow this piece.)
On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.
These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones. (more…)
