After some time I found myself in what could have been a basement. Could have been, because I was on the ground level but the floor above was the main floor, the main attraction, where the money was spent and the time spent and meetings held and the arguments had. I was below this floor. So it felt like a basement, but was not. In this place that could have been a basement was a very large, very emotional, very Nicaraguan void. Sentinel pillars of stone stood vigilantly around the room leaving open a large, vast, vapid space in the middle. The floor here was different from the floor everywhere else in that dollar-a-pop convent convertible. The air was musty in a soothing, I-am-home, banana sort of way that tickled my skin and hugged my lungs and made me feel safe, and old, and tired and ready. There was some mash-up of colored, meaningless, afterthought tiles in between those vigilant sentinel pillars of stone. Like a city, or a park, or head office, or the world – the area had some method, had some reason that could only be seen if you were high enough. So I walked up a few creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs and looked down upon that square, vast floor and saw some complex mosaic of a man. He had a beard, thin eyes, a kind smile, old cellophane wrinkles in the corners of his eyes that were like rivers of wisdom leading to his beard made of time and history. A man that had no doubt done something, or paid for something or done something so that he could pay for something. The wearisome, selfless sun seemed to peak in like some curious child through every archaic crack of wood and every knocked-out hole of stone and every open air courtyard throughout the rest of that expansive, daunting, fatiguing-to-look-at, convent.

I walked back down those creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs. On my way down I saw something I did not see before. It was under some bulk-head like it knew to lurk in the shadows. Like it knew how valuable it was and how beautiful it was and is. There it sat painted in a decaying, peeling, emotional red skin, a blanket, a covering, a pelt. There it sat in the orange light of the glowing, gleeful sun. There it sat before my tired, thin, straining, tourist eyes. A piano with white keys that had gone yellow that were once in line and straight but now looked like some candy loving child’s parents-in-the-poor-house teeth. The golden pedals of three were warped and contorted like a misshaped women walking down the misshaped streets of colonial Latin America. I approached the piano with weary, curious, infant steps. It was like some star shining in the night sky that could not be ignored. Some star that you saw that night but no one else did and so you were the only one who stared at it, waiting for it to do something special, something Godly. It had some eye-shadowed force field of love around it. A woman who is naturally attractive but whose hair hangs down in negligence of her beauty and whose face sits plain in protest. A woman who is beautiful but does not want to be.

I struck a sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life key that echoed a sour worn-out din all throughout those vast hallways and umbrella arches and thousand year old courtyards. I turned around to see if someone was looking. The open space was now full. A hundred antique people in antique dress with antique hats and antique smiles looked at me like some time traveling tourist in their seventeenth century tableau.The air was still soothing and hugged me but it was musty no more, and touristic no more, and it was fresh and new and time-honored. Shit eating grins don’t change, they never have and those hundred people in there funny gowns and fluffy suits and vibrant, colorful auras and dark, Latin, brown-sugar skin all starred at me with some blank historic shit eating grin. A young man who was dressed more elaborately than the rest and who was no doubt the subject of whatever celebration they were celebrating, came close to me with his kind face and open hand and fruity step. As he came closer his eyes became less focused on me and more interested in what was beyond me which I knew was only that strange, haunted red piano. The whole scene was too much, too strange, too dream-like and too real. I stepped to the side to look at the piano and the funny man who wanted it. The magic. The imagination. The ghost like transformation of a thing. The piano was gone. Standing in its place was some stunning, beautiful, fantastic, perfect, dark Latin woman of youth and wonder and a hungry sort of wisdom. Her dark hair, thick and flowing like southern honey and her eyes gleaming out her tanned sockets. Her finger nails white against her brown fingers. Her face delicate and strong and flooring at the same time. Her body wrapped in a luscious, long, cloud of billowing red silk dress.

The vintage man said to that vintage woman something like ‘Hey baby, come and dance with me in front of all these people who will be jealous of our beauty and our youth and our love and our future’. And she took his hand and said ‘If they will be so jealous, we must always remember how valuable a thing we have’ with her eyes. The whole fuss was so colonial and special and once-in-a-lifetime I thought to myself how sad and sorry those dollar-a-pop tourists would be knowing they missed this amazing haunt. And how miserable they would be after clicking their cameras away into oblivion to find out that all those cameras shot was an empty space filled with empty air haunted by a thousand ghosts or more. The colonial couple gracefully, romantically glided onto the dance floor like actors in a tourism brochure in some bleak, cold, winter-bogged office or agency. The floor was no longer a complex mosaic of a man’s face, but was a simple, stark, layout of blue and white Nicaraguan craft. The whole gleeful, vibrant, jealous crowd watched the couple with loving, envious, vicarious lenses. I wondered to myself if people back then were born knowing how to dance. How could they have time to learn amongst all the strife, and history, and time, and war and planning. I wondered to myself who the man was on the floor that was once there but had changed. And then I saw him, in the flesh, in the ghostly flesh, standing amongst the crowd, eyes wider, skin tighter, smile healthier. I saw him with his hands held tightly together in awe and gratitude. I saw his eyes in the red beauty’s eyes, and his skin on the red beauty’s skin and his smile in the red beauty’s smile. I saw him watch his daughter glide around that dance floor, that would-be shrine, in happiness and ignorance and love. His was the only glare without jealousy and envy and wonder and was instead of pride and relief and thunderous joy.

Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate, and prejudice echoed through those empty corridors and vast courtyards. Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate and prejudice came closer and closer. Marching orders, chants, scared whispers carried on the antique wind. Some other Latin army from some other Latin country across some fake, perforated border was suddenly in the crowd, amongst it, on the dance floor dancing their very own dance of disgust. Guns fired, screams fired, shrieks fired, arms up in the air as the whole scene fired and turned from colonial love to colonial hate. That mosaic tile father stood before the army’s leader in some useless, proud, desperate plea. The lovers held each other tightly. They shot the young male lover for something he did or didn’t do and before they could shoot his bride the old mosaic man got before her and took her bullet, stole her fate. A father’s life to save his daughter’s. That young male lover looked up at his widow-to-be and said something like ‘Run, baby’ and she did run, she ran right to me, right past me and the army shot out a flurry of hateful, ignorant, pointless, tax-paying bullets towards me and her and me and her and me and her. She took more than enough bullets before falling at the foot of some new, not decaying, not peeling still emotional piano painted red behind me. I looked back at the fallen groom who looked upon his fallen bride with fallen eyes of sorrow and of love. I looked back at the groom as he looked up at me, into my fallen eyes of sorrow, right in the eyes I swear, and said ‘Hey man, you there, protect my love, protect my red beauty, any way you can, man’ and as I looked back behind me the bride was gone. All that remained was that piano, only now it was decaying, and peeling and emotional and a worn sort of red.

Now I was alone. All was silent. There was no army upon us, there was no crowd of jealousy watching. There was no loving bride or loving groom or loving scene and the only regretful father to be seen was to be seen amidst the complex mosaic tiles upon the colonial, worn floor. All was as it was and the sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life note still floated through the old air like sailors on some ocean cloud looking for the land of a better day. I paid a fortune for that piano and now it sits in my modern room surrounded by modern things bought by a modern man and it embodies love and it embodies history and stands for a promise made and the notes and cries and love still hang in the air like frozen rain drops on their way down to the sorry ground. Like some apocalyptic, Nicaraguan death-rattle.

END

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To artists, ideas are currency. Inspiration, quite literally, equals dollars. Honest art is bankable. Ideas are fuel for an artist’s idle mind. Artists run on ideas the same way nine-to-fivers run on food and watered-down coffee. Without ideas, artists don’t get out of bed. Without ideas, they meander about like forgeries of who they want to be. Without ideas, artists crumble. I am not talking about ‘my-mother-thinks-it-is-great-and-that-people-would-really-enjoy-it’ ideas. And I am not talking about some ‘great-idea-that-some-old-high-school-buddy-ran-by-me-at-some-random-party-last-weekend’ idea. I am talking about honest ideas. Art without honesty is just craft. Honest ideas worth sharing. Spreading. Ideas that nurture. Ideas that mean something. Ideas that are the food, the very sustenance of the future. And these ideas, when you get them, hit hard. They feel right. You know it right away. They must be developed. Those are the ideas I am talking about.

Without honest ideas, artists have nothing.

To artists, good honest ideas are a lot like love. They hurt. They provide. They enlighten. They must be. Lovers are jealous of those around them that know true love. Artists are jealous of their peers who have found that one true, virgin idea – no matter what they say. Like love, ideas are connected to the artist’s life. They are connected to their soul. And, like any lover, when the idea is not there the soul is broken. The soul is empty. The soul is a shadow. Love is this thing, this intangible thing, and you cannot calculate it and you cannot actually describe it. An idea is the same: immeasurable and infinite and inexplicable. You can talk about it, sure, and you can run it by people. But they will never, ever, know its true meaning or power. They will always and forever fail to grasp the application of it, the necessity of it, the inevitability of it. They will merely listen to it like the news.

Love is only real to the lover just as the idea is only real to the artist.

This is why those who love artists are bound to know pain. Because an artist must learn about ideas, search for ideas, find ideas, realize they are worthless, search for more ideas and hope, one day, to find an idea worth holding on to. A lover must learn about love, search for love, find love, realize that that love is false, search for more love and hope, one day, to find a love worth dying for. A lover must fight for love. An artist might fight for inspiration. But, at some point in an artist’s life, a lover will appear. And that lover will suffer through their partner’s fight for love as well as their fight for art. And because that artist’s soul is as attached to love as it is to ideas, his soul will be forever torn.

Without love, the lover ceases to be. Without ideas, the artist ceases to be. That is how important ideas are. That is the value of muse. The importance of applicable imagination. The reason for angst. The great, cosmic motivator. Art knows no rules. Love knows no rules. There is only feeling. There is only theory.

To an artist, to have nothing is not to be hungry or to be homeless or to be alone. To an artist, to have nothing is to know nothing, to think nothing. To an artist, true nothingness is a void in the soul and in the mind. Blackness. To an artist, having nothing is about non-existence, to everyone else, having nothing is about a poor existence.

Let’s look at ideas as a business.

Imagine if your business was something as elusive as love, as abstract as love, as incalculable as love. Imagine for a moment that your business was not based on the foundations of an academic curriculum. That the basics of your business did not exist in an over-priced textbook. Imagine instead that the recorded history of your business was a compilation of thoughts, rants, speculations and fantasies that belonged to a mad few. How would you educate yourself? What certainty would you have?

To the artist, the only certainty is the presence of uncertainty. The only permanence is impermanence. The only something is nothing. Faith in nothing. Faith in blackness. Faith that the true idea is out there and that it will come crashing upon his door, and into his living room, into his mind. Faith that something he cannot describe is still possible. Faith that something he cannot see still exists. Faith that something he cannot deposit at the bank is still, somehow, currency.

The practice of love requires blind, unmitigated faith. The practice of art requires the same.

This is the great torture of the artist’s life. Love is found in another person. The lover need only meet as many people as possible. But the pristine, undrunk idea floats in the air, blows around in the wind, crawls in the dirt beneath the rock and has no actual physical presence. Love can smack him in the face. Ideas can pass right on by. If he does not grab them, they will float onward in search of another artist who is actually listening. An artist who has not yet lost faith.

And when an artist loses that faith, when he forgets that anything is possible, when he looks to facts for answers and when he turns his back on nothingness, when he stops reaching in the seemingly empty air, when he feels that the next true idea does not exist – that is when the artist has nothing. That is when the artist is hungry. That is when he is homeless.

The absence of ideas is the artist’s one true fear.

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This is what I have learned: every man loses. He loses his baby teeth. He loses his toys. He may lose his first love, he will probably lose his virginity. He will surely lose his temper more times than one, his job, his wallet and his keys. He will lose control. He will lose sleep. He will make bets and will lose some of them. After a while, he may lose his hair and he may once again lose his teeth. Soon enough, he will lose friends, family members and loved ones. He may eventually come to lose his sanity, his reason and his dignity. But he will most certainly lose his life. Every man loses, but, every man must gain as well and it is what that man does in between that defines his forward movement. It is how he tempers the loss with good sense that matters most. These are notions from a mind that wishes he knew then what he knows now.

My great-aunt passed away this week. She was an amazing woman, a beacon of not only hope but strength and fortitude as well. She was eighty-eight. I was exceptionally close to my grandmother – having lived with her for the last eight years of her life and was present at the unfathomable moment of her life’s end. After my grandmother’s passing, her sister, my great-aunt, took on a somewhat commemorative quality. To be in the presence of my aunt was to also be in the presence of my late grandmother and because both women were remarkable, the pleasure was doubled. So to was the pain when the former went to go reunite with her departed sister not four days ago. Now, there are no ‘great’ or ‘grand’ relatives remaining and an entire generation has gone to wind.

Such a profound loss effects a man deeply; strikes him at his very nucleus. When his core is shaken so, it becomes a challenge for him to temper his loss with any constructive judgment or rationale. Yes, he may have the support of a companion or the solace of a loving embrace but no less painful does the presence of a confidant it make. Does not the wind wear away the stone face of a cathedral no matter the strength of its buttresses? And so, how is a man to know the proper route through such a dimly lit and gloomy maze?

A man can lose all the keys, jobs and wallets imaginable but there is not a tangible object invented yet that can prepare him for the loss of a life. Do we not learn from loss? But what sort of character growth can we hope to obtain from such trivial displacements as these? As the loss becomes greater, so too does the wisdom gained from it. But does one not need the wisdom first, to bear the loss? Will we forever be one step behind fate? Likely. But, perhaps the anticipation of such a loss can mitigate the sorrow of it. To be forewarned is to be forearmed; and so, I find a certain refuge in the following concept by Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master:

A man’s loss is a writer’s gain.

Of all the idiosyncrasies and self-deprecating habits I employ as a defeatist writer, perhaps the most distressing is the inferiority I feel concerning the relatively smooth and colorless life I have led up to now. It is often argued that a writer’s work is influenced greatly by his own life experiences. If this is even partially true, from what reservoir is the dull writer to pull forth his readable tales and compassionate characters? Fiction is drama. And so, what drama can be expected from the author who has seen but little of it?

Take a look at some of the greats: Oscar Wilde was a socialite and a homosexual in a very conservative time. He was arrested for sodomy, tried for buggery and, upon refusing to flee to France, served two years in prison. He spent three years in exile and was separated from his wife and sons and died poor of syphilitic meningitis. Hemingway? His father committed suicide, he was married four times, fought in world war one, he was wounded, decorated, knew world leaders, refit his boat into a warship, survived a pane crash, fought in world war two, was decorated again and survived another plane crash. These men knew drama, they knew loss and they knew what it was to let life shape art. They experienced the full spectrum of human emotion and condition. Such a rich and plentiful bag of muse they had from which to harvest real and honest characters and venues. Not that they necessarily had to write about exactly what had happened to them, but what did happen to them gave them a certain insight into the measure of a man and how far he could go before he broke. They comprehended more accurately how loved ones react in extraordinary circumstances. The world is formed by the ebb and flow of cause and effect and these men witnessed more cause and more effect than other duller men. So, you see, it’s not the experience that inspires a writer’s truthful word, it is what that experience showed him about mankind.

I’m not exactly chasing loss or heartache, but, when it is thrust upon me by the crafty hand of fate, its value is not entirely neglected. When life hands you a lemon, right? The recent death of my aunt blotted out the shining sun above my cheerful day, it made bland all the wonderful latin flavors I placed upon my tongue, it warped the lens through which I observe the world. These tools: the sun, my sense of taste, my outlook – they have an immense impact on words which I write and the tales which I weave. Thus, the reverberations between life and art are impossible to ignore.

I suppose if I were given the opportunity to choose between inspiring loss and inert bliss, I would choose bliss, for blood runs thicker than ink, but my writing would forever suffer for it. It is a hard thing for a man to bear a loss, be it a wallet or a life, but the time comes when he must make the best of things and move on. Mourn, recover, create.

Originally Published in Digital Americana Magazine

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The glassy blue water blended itself into the powdery sky creating, as it were, no visible horizon. Instead, there was but one uniform sheet held up in front of us as we motored through choppy, tropical waters in a small fiberglass skiff. We were off the coast of the Azuero peninsula, in the Gulf of Panamá, trolling for yellow-fin tuna at break-neck speeds. The peninsula was a wild sort of place with untouched forests that crept to a wind-swept beach upon which the lonely ocean crashed. With no signs of civilization, one would have assumed the small boat that had awaited our arrival, ten meters out, bobbing in the ebb and flow of the languid tide, was simply dropped into those lapping waters from an invisible chasm in the sky.

As company in the diminutive vessel, there was my father in-law, brother in-law, the pilot who flew us from provincial Panamá in his somewhat dated prop-plane and the owner of the boat who had brought along his teenage son for the afternoon – all six of us huddled around a busted cooler in the middle of the skiff like the homeless crowding around a rusty barrel of fire in the night. The fisherman and his son spoke no English and my Spanish was far too broken to rely on it for pleasantries, thus we hurtled forth, a fishing rod erect out either side of the craft like insect antennae, in virtual silence listening only to the crash of the boat on its own wake like some broken assembly-line machine. Just about the time I felt as far removed as was possible from the two bare-footed Panamanians – our lives, mine and theirs, seemed not like two variations of the same thing but two entirely different things altogether – the son of that weathered fisherman broke the silence, leaned forward to within ear-shot of me and yelled out over the hum of the Yamaha four-stroke in Spanish slow enough for me to understand ‘Do you have Facebook? I have Facebook.’

His simple statement, of which, I may add, he was perfectly delighted, was for me, a revelation. Here was this boy whom by experience alone was probably more of a man than I, and whom, if he did in fact go to school, probably did so in classroom with a dirt floor, this boy of no more than sixteen who every day came home no doubt smelling of dead fish and tackle and who every day woke to the sound of a rooster’s cry, asking me, first-world traveller, second-rate writer, about facebook, concerned, surely, with his ever-expanding online network. This was not the first time, nor the last, that I experienced this revelation.

I had felt it years before, traveling Southeast Asia, when I observed the bond between Soukyian, a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver, and his younger brother, Cee, who brokered the discounted ride to the firing-range, and who had come along to watch a Canadian try to fire an abandoned Russian AK-47. I listened to the two bicker about which was the more efficient route or who would get to finish the nutty-liquid treat we bought from a street vendor outside the S-21 prison camp, and, could not help but detect, in those two dusty Cambodians, a younger, sandier reflection of myself and my brother. I felt it again while walking up a mountain road in search of coffee plantations in rural Guatemala with Antonio, who was my local guide, while he spoke to me about the plot of land he had just procured, of his aspirations of farming the land and of making his fortune from the toil and providing to his family a life of security and safety. We may have lived, Antonio and I, in two very different countries, but the motivations that lived within us, the priorities which defined our forward motion, were, on some basic instinctual level, equivalent.

When I was young, and my mind was still a dry sponge gasping in the hot sun for the quenching dampness of knowledge, I would dream of wandering this great planet, of exploring its distant lands and getting to know its exotic cultures. It seemed, to a boy of such naiveté, that there was a finite number of categories of which all the people of the world must fit into and be classified thus, like species of plants to a botanist, and understood. It appeared, to his raw unsophistication, that to know the world of man would be to know the all the differences within it – for, is not diversity what man offers so exclusively to this rich and vibrant kingdom? Imagine the boy’s surprise when, as a man later in years, he finds out by way of traveling the world that to comprehend the race of man is not to be aware of what differentiates its natives, but, in fact, what unites them.

Fears, hopes, dreams, love, rage, desire – all these things and more – possess no class or colour, they know not the wealthy from the poor nor black from white and are, entirely and completely, universal. Does not the flame both the thief and beggar burn? Or the hammer bruise? Does not the blade both the winner and loser cut? Does not the presence of fright make race the beating heart within every man? Yes. All we humans, in all our moments of bigotry, our hours of bias and days of narrow-mindedness, through every discriminating glance or partial decision made, are the same. We are the same whilst we quarrel, we are the same whilst we debate and even whilst we march upon our mother earth, with the drums of war a-beating and the flags of hate a-waving, are all alike.

A storm will always come. The winds of change will blow across every plain, rustle each forest, and raise bumps upon the skin of all who know its chilled embrace. There is no ear that is deaf to the rumble of far off thunder, nor an ego immune to its shaky portent. The rains will make wet the shoulders of the clever and of the inept and waft, to and fro, in no particular direction over the scurrying crowds. North, south, east and west, the waters will rise and all of the races all over the world will seek out, when that time comes, higher ground. And all those people, all worried for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, will be all warm, all safe, all relieved within the same crowded shelter. All of man’s bridges will crumble and all his buildings will be undermined as will his be his pyramids of social standing and of ancient preference. The African and the German, who shiver both from the same damp chill, will know there is no difference between them. The Indonesian, American and Australian, all huddled together for warmth, will know that they are the same. The fathers will all hold open the doors to that shelter so that their families may enter safely before them. Mothers of different tongues will nod and share sighs of relief that their offspring is safe within arm’s reach. It is only we humans that know prejudice. Only we humans are aware of some difference between us, a difference that nature knows nothing of, a difference that fate and destiny scoff at upon their cosmic course.

It is this state of things, this very human condition, the core of everything, not the skeleton but the very marrow in the bones, this unseen current, this natural concrete which binds together the fabrics of all walks of life, that, as a writer, I yearn to tap, to harvest and to, one day, comprehend fully. It is this truth that gives reason to all life. It is this reality that levels to the ground the pillars of sand that man hath built with his intolerant hand and stood upon with weary balance. It is this fundamental depth that unifies us.

Written on the road in Northern Guatemala

Originally Published in Digital Americana Magazine
 

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The same puppy peeks his head out the small hole in the cracked hundred-year-old door. He ventures out into the dangerous streets of man. He knows nothing. I am jealous. He looks clean, and curious and awake and perfect. I roll the cigar in between my jaded finger tips. I feel the tobacco leaves crunch beneath the pressure. Cars drive by, breaking though my field of smoke like some obese runner on some historic track in some obscure memory. They drive by and scare the puppy. He runs back into his hovel with a boyish whimper. I worry for him. I wonder what kind life he can have in these penniless, worn paths. In these archaic doorways where archaic people make archaic decisions and they are happy. In these happy streets and happy rooms where nights disappear into time with no regret. I wonder what kind of life he will have here.

The same baby giggles and cries and whines and laughs and the sounds carry on the wind with my dancing ballerinas to a far off place resembling the future. A million doors line a million streets and the baby is everywhere. A thousand babies have one voice. I start to feel the heat of my cigar ember as it burns down through itself towards me. It is cheap so it burns fast. I am alone and so I suck away at it more than I need to. I suck as the baby whines and our actions become one in the sands of Latin America. I wonder what kind of life that baby can have. I wonder about the sailors and drinkers and fighters and workers and poets and paupers who smoked cigars on these light year streets light years ago and listened to that baby’s parents giggle and cry and whine and laugh. The ballerinas dance. The show goes on. The great big show of time.

The street women scampers with her crooked spine down the crooked alley screaming nothing screams to a nothing audience. No one hears but me. Maybe the puppy hears but the puppy has her figured out already. I am far from that. I have figured out my cigar, my cup of dirt red wine and my parchment shirt. Beyond that I am lost. She makes her way like some misshaped stone down the beach, rolling in the waters, bouncing, fighting, scraping the basement of the world. She does not wonder about anything because she knows everything. She knows the depths of the oceans and the heights of the heavens. She has climbed the ladders of the world with her zig zag gate. She walks with a crutch but it has no purpose. No purpose outside sympathy, delusion, food and a hat full of coins. I wonder where she got it.

The two military men with their military strut and long, shiny, backslide machine guns, walk over to me, the boy with the short cigar. The boy with the short fuse who watches the street woman with the short left leg. They smell the tobacco, the smell the fear, the ignorance, the youth. They smell with their military noses my bohemian cup filled with bohemian drink on those bohemian city streets. Drip, drip, drip from the ancient eaves trough onto the stone long eroded with garbage and rain and water and dusty steps of dusty people. The street woman gallops off into fate’s dark swallows. Fate gulps her up. I can see the bottom of my glass through the small amount of wine still left in my cup like a wise man sees the bottom of the ocean from his small tin skiff. It swashes around before his glassy eyes and he contemplates it, wonders how it came to be and how it will ever, ever come to pass. He gulps it up. The machine guns follow the crooked tread into the throws of fate and its big, wide, slobbery mouth saying ‘awe’.

I sit in front of a hulking, bombed-out church. Walls crumbling before my eyes and making the ground higher with resentment. The dust of stone blowing off into the blue night wind. Its doors are long gone, its roof is long gone, its floors are gone and its people are gone. But its memory lives and its command lives and its pulsing, cold body lives. Purple lights placed by modern man for modern tourists shine garishly upon its grand skin insultingly. The yellow moon battles the purple lights in a never ending chromatic debate. My thousand dancing ballerinas dance with a thousand more who danced throughout the sunrises and sunsets of sorry, forgotten, ageless ages. Like some tank, like some beast, like some scolding father or teacher who knows-it-all, that bombed-out church changes the night as the wind finds its way around it. A thousand ghosts rise up from the oiled, shiny, tumbled, jumbled stones to greet me and greet the puppy of youth and the screaming, contorted woman of fate. They shake my smokey hand and kiss my wine-soaked lips. A thousand ghosts with a million memories and million more concerns all parade their way down those yellow, moonlit alleys and haunt a million more thin-skinned, happy dreams.

A puddle ripples as they hover by. My eye catches it. The fuzzy puppy is gone. The bent women is gone. The confident military men are gone. It is me and the buildings of time. I dash my burning hot peach blunt missile into the ruffled spectating waters and move on beneath that blue night sky. The hiss of hot hitting cold pierces the still air like a godly arrow from some golden bow far beyond the heavens. Rubber tires rumble on those rubble stone streets. I go against the grain, blending in with those rubble stone streets back to my hovel. The drip, drip, drip and the scamper, scamper, scamper and the whines and the giggles and ghost’s cries and the peach hiss remind me of my lonely keyboard and its lonely letters waiting to be worn away with vain musings and inept observations. My fuzzy thoughts and bent memories and confident stare guide me falsely through those ruffled waters of time. Falsely towards that finish line. Those vibrant, smokey scenes of a colonial venue masterpiece will raise forever before my glassy eyes like a thousand dancing ballerinas all dressed in vibrant gray.

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As a former chef, and now moonlighting film director, I am well acquainted with the feeling of being surrounded by a frenzy of activity and subjected to an onslaught of endless questions. Not to mention incessantly being rushed against the always-winning march of time. Writing is perhaps one of the few careers that can happen in complete isolation and veritable seclusion. I like it way. I was often told, as I entered the cutthroat, shit-spinning world of show business, that the scariest person on a film’s payroll, to the people who stock its waters, is the writer. And not because writers are the mentally unstable, loose cannons that they are rumoured to be, but because they are the only ones who can’t be supervised while they work. What happens in those dark offices and mouldering basements is, to the paranoid suits, a mystery.

After writing a few successful screenplays in true hermitic fashion, I realized that nobody parades their fear around in the film world anyway, so the notion that someone is actually nervous about your efforts mattered not. However, I have since made the transition to fiction and, in doing so, multiplied the mysteries surrounding my work and amplified their influence upon me greatly.

Let me briefly elaborate upon some of these head-cocking, eye-squinting, shoulder shrugging concepts:

We Are Not Our Characters

When I first fell in love with fiction writing at the age of twenty six (the same year I read my first novel cover-to-cover) I became enamoured with Norman Mailer and all his masculine swagger and literary prowess. I remember watching a televised debate in which two hundred some-odd feminists verbally wrestled with Mailer over his character’s recurring chauvinistic philosophies and sexist mentalities. Mailer chortled to himself behind the large microphone and explained simply that just because characters he designed (for the purposes of a fictional narrative) possessed those virtues it didn’t necessarily mean that he agreed with them.

I am glad that I watched that comical exchange so early in my literary career, for I would have to defend the same dislocation many times to strangers and family members alike because of something they had read in one of my stories. If I wrote of a man who frequented brothels, my girlfriend would confront me in a dark corner of the house and ask if there were some impulses I had been stifling. If one of my characters spoke about his tempestuous childhood it wouldn’t be long until my mother would shed a tear before my eyes and ask if she had made a mistake in my youth. We no more concur with the thoughts of our characters than a lawyer does with the actions of the man he defends. We create for a living.

Our Characters Can Surprise Us

After I have put hours and hours of arduous labour into defining, building and vitalizing characters for one of my stories they become real in my mind’s eye. They are no longer fictional beings with no memory, pulse or blood relations. They are as real, sometimes even more real, than those who live and breathe around me. So it is commonplace for a character I devise to know far more about themselves than I do. It may sound strange, but there is a maximum capacity to the writer’s mind, though even when it has been reached, the writer is aware that creativity knows no bounds. And thus, the players in his scene often say things which surprise him – for the writer’s hand can not hope to operate nearly as fast as the speed of his imagination.

This ‘creationist’ element to the writer’s work is possibly the most difficult to explain but also the most imperative to his story’s honesty. If every character in a novel spoke and thought just like their author it would be more an autobiography than a fabrication.

We Are Sensitive To Our Surroundings

The gardener toils so long as the garden is present and the painter paints only if the canvas sits before him. It may be assumed that wherever a typewriter sits, or a computer is plugged in, a writer, in theory, should be able to write. Not so. The first short story I ever wrote, called “The Day The Old Man Knocked”, was written against the playlist of Glenn Gould’s 1982 Golberg Variations and so, when I sit down to write just about anything these days, I must turn on my Glenn Gould, otherwise, it just doesn’t feel right.

How the light is coming in through the window, what sounds are being carried on the wind, who meanders about the house, upon which chair do I sit; all these, and a thousand more, are critical factors in my creative comfort and without them in place, the words might not comes as deftly. As my girlfriend and I have just moved in together, into a house in Central America, the subject of my required writing environment has been the theme of much discourse and as our space is somewhat limited it has also become quite the Rubik’s Cube. Like any true writer; my words on my pages are ever eloquent while the words out of my mouth are bumbling and offensive. I said to her “I will mange just fine, baby, I just can’t have you anywhere in my sight…” Needless to say I didn’t write that night, but she understood that the conditions in which I write are just as important as the subject upon which I write.

We Put Value In Things On Faith

This is a concept that is far better understood by my girlfriend than by her parents, or even mine for that matter. While some writers have the luxury of stability (and some of those may call it a curse) those like myself, who write on speculation, do so completely on faith with no guaranteed financial reward. We have a feeling deep down in our artistic gut that tells us these words must be written and this story will be read. It is a sensation that the salesman knows little of and the receptionist finds difficult to relate to, for, every other Thursday they get paid for their efforts. But like the squirrel who stores his nuts when he comes into a pile, writers are accustomed to the inconsistency of income, though some writer’s deal with this palaver better than others.

The fact that you are exhausting an entire year, or two, or three, upon 100,000 words that you aren’t being compensated to write is hard to explain to someone. Yet, the writer sees nary a thing wrong with the equation, for it is what he knows. Such is why this element of faith is one of the predominant riddles that puzzle the non-writer’s mind.

Reading Is Part Of Our Job

Eating was part of my job when I was a chef. Watching movies was part of my job when I was a film director and reading is part of my job now that I am trying to write for a living. However eating, watching movies and reading appear far from duties of employment to the untrained eye. Now, I am well aware that this section of the article could resonate much like a well written excuse, though I can’t stress enough the importance of knowing your field, studying those who built it and improving upon those who have steered it wrong.

Hemingway said, in “A Moveable Feast”, that after every day of writing he would pick up a book in order to occupy his consciousness and prevent it from dwelling upon the words he wrote that day. He believed that his subconsciousness would take care of all the necessary analysis and examination and prepare him for the following day of writing. Without that book his mind would have barreled down the rabbit hole of over inspection and led to self-doubt and uncertainty which would be sure to cripple his momentum.

Yes, it is always interesting when the life of a writer collides with the life of a non-writer, for the writer lives by this abstract and metaphysical set of rules and without them he is hollow and sluggish. I have said it before, and often felt the sting of its candor; ‘Corrosive is the artist’s idle mind’, meaning to be slowed down or stopped in one’s writing is a precarious notion. My goals for this piece are two fold; explain to those people who are perplexed by writers the strangeness of their work and the reasons for their oddity as well as assisting me in making sense of these virtues and regimens that with each passing day become less work ethic and more religion.

Originally Published in Digital Americana Magazine
 
 

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Well, there he was, our great hero, under a tarp of dusty grey,
In the back of a soggy grain cart like some American cliche.
One that you’d read in Kerouac and think this can’t be true,
But for guys like Johnny and like Jack, it’s all they really knew.

At some sandy station between here and the border of Philly,
Got on a burly well-dressed man who said his name was Billy.
‘There is something about the smell of barley,’ said the fancy rider
‘That makes my mouth water some for a pint of a Vermont cider.’
Johnny wasn’t a cider-man but thought ‘What bad could it do,
To pass the molasses time away with another man who,
Is surely runnin’ from somethin’ bad enough to have him scared.’
Silence reigned in that moldy heap before old Bill softly declared:
‘I’ve made my fortune and lost it all and now this is my life,
A bill fold in my pocket has been replaced by a rusty knife.
And I’ve rode enough of these carts to know one thing is for sure,
Women, money and the law are the only reasons for this hellish tour.
So I’ve said already mine is money, tell me sir, what’s it for you?’
Johnny took out some Red Man leaf and began to chew and chew.
‘Man, if you must know,’ Johnny said, ‘it’s all of the above,
Cause there are many lives I lead, none of which I am proud of.’
Then tuxedo Billy said as he stared Johnny Mark in the eye:
‘For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths that one must die.’
A profound silence hung in the air inside that steamy metal cart,
Then Johnny asked the following with his hand over his heart:
‘Haven’t I heard that line before? Wasn’t it some kind of poet?’
‘Indeed. It was Oscar Wilde, but tell me, sir, how’d you know it?’
‘I was raised by a man and woman who always loved their art,
And poetry from the greats and the philosophy of Descartes.
I would have been a finer man had I not struck out alone,
After they came clean and told me I was not their own.
That happened when I was twelve years old and since that very day
I have lived a life out on the road under these tarps of dusty grey.’
A sort of vagabond approval hung in the air of that speeding train,
And for a moment all was peaceful in the wanderer’s domain.

‘Which scares you the most of the three lives you run from?’
Asked Tuxedo Billy like some old bar room chum.
‘The law scares me somethin’ awful cause it does not rest,
and the women scares me even more cause she knows me best.
But the money, that thing you run from, doesn’t bother me any,
Cause any hustler on any road will at some point find a penny.
The hardest part, for a man like me, is the lonesome walkin’ part
But when I come across that penny it tends to lift my heart.’
‘That is true, sir. A man is more than the colour of his collar,
But my problem is, for every penny I find, I tend to lose a dollar.’

Johnny Mark and tuxedo Billy dozed off by and by,
And like Kerouac they both dreamt of ice cream and apple pie.
Johnny awoke as the cold rain came in through the open door,
Tuxedo Bill had bailed somewhere but left a penny upon the floor.

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Well, she had no luck even after a talk with her mighty lord,
So Johnny’s momma left him in the backseat of a ford.
But before she closed that back seat door she sat down beside her son
And said “You can’t understand me now, but try to listen to me John,
I’m not proud of what I do, but son you gotta believe
That whatever’s you set your mind onto you can surely achieve.
And this world in which we live is nasty and it’s mean
And the love I have for you, well, that love is ever green.
So the sin I do here and now in this wicked parking lot
Is not one I do for fear and will not soon be forgot.
But I do this thing I do to you because I love you so
And want you to have a life like we could never know.
But please Johnny, remember this, there are men in this town
Who’ll try their damnedest to break your stride and pull your spirit down.”

The wind picked up outside the doors of that shiny ride
And Johnny’s momma thought to herself as she glared outside:
‘Maybe the couple who owns this car are rich and they won’t mind
If they come out to head home and an empty spot they find.
Maybe he will say to her “They must need it more than us.”
And she will say “Your right, babe, no need to make a fuss.”
By this time Johnny and his mom would be upon the freeway
Doin’ one fifteen, windows down, towards a brighter day.

Johnny’s momma was then startled back into the coldness of real life
By the husband who walked towards the ford with his lovely wife.
“Well, Johnny Mark, the time has come to say farewell
And to free you not of a mother, but from a diving bell.”
And as his momma slid towards that shiny backseat door
Johnny Mark’s passive wheeze gave way to a mighty roar.
When that couple got to their car they were met with surprise
And found that what they heard were a baby’s lonesome cries.

Johnny’s momma look upon the scene from a damp, dark knoll
And as that car pulled away she wept beyond all control.
A man who was near that night swears he heard her cry:
“To all my life and to all my love, to all my reason; goodbye!”

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The things I do and the things I say,
Are not to be taken in any way,
That either of those things may portray,
The way I actually feel on any day.
Because even on a good one I just may,
Without even knowing it betray or display,
In the things I do and the things I say,
A false truth that is faraway
From my actual mood on that day.
 

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He was no shark nor a business man, just a drunk and a fool
So, Johnny Mark finished his drink and his game of hustled pool
And then went out with pockets full into that sticky southern air
But the lights outside the pool hall doors showed his wear and tear.
That’s when Johnny walked to the road in the foggy shade of night
Towards a lonely highway and a flickering traffic light
If Johnny wasn’t so drunk and stoned he might have noticed quicker
That nothing stirred, not even a fly, around that empty flicker.
But there he stood like a drunken guard in some perverse tableau
When another man with a cigarette escaped from some shadow
“My name is Vlad,” the stranger said. “It’s nice to meet you, son.”
Then Johnny shook his hand and the formalities were done.
“I’m different than any man you’ve met, cause they’re of the mortal sort
And I can see you take some risks in life so I’m gonna keep this short.
Most the times I do the biting first and save the chat for last
But tonight’s the night I’m gonna turn my back on my lonesome past.
You see, Johnny Mark, I’ve prowled this world for more years than you know
And I’ve tasted the blood from the neck of every Jane and John Doe
But as their blood runs down my throat and fills my soul with fire
I swallow deeply and think to myself ‘What did they desire?’
So you are the one, the momentous first, that will have his rightful say
And get to choose whether or not this is his judgement day.”

“If I were to bend my neck for you and let you drink from me
What kind of life are we talkin’ about, what would my future be?”

Vlad the stranger squinted his eyes and took out his pack’a smokes
And knew deep down that Johnny Mark was different from other folks.
“Well, Johnny, listen here: The life I sell is full of sin
So if you ain’t down with goin’ to Hell, I won’t even begin.
Just believe you me, that place down there, it ain’t all that hard
And the fire and the screams, well, you come to disregard.
But you will trudge upon this world forever in a lonely daze
With all the power in your immortal hands but very little praise.
Women, money, drink and joy; these things will come with ease
And you’ll never come to know things like sickness or disease.”
And then Vlad said “Take a look around ya boy, tell me are ya scared?”
Johnny Mark took his look around and then he did declare:

“You say I can have women and all the money I could ever need
But I work upon a farm and know what it is to overfeed.
What good are all the mortal women if they die within my arm
Just like the livestock in the prairie or the horse upon my farm?
And what was the other thing? Oh, yeah, all the money I could find?
No fortune alive could buy a soul, not all the riches of mankind!
So, Vlad, I say to you, go find another sap
Who’ll dive in to your sinister ways and your wicked trap.”

Vlad stood there in the twitchy light and said ‘Farewell, Johnny Mark’
Then he lit another cigarette and disappeared into the dark.
 

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