Eating An Elephant

When I used to give my workshop on ‘How to get Started Writing’ I always had a cute opening. Perhaps not cute but truthful and to the point. I told the class: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Then I added: “How do you write a book?  One page at a time.” That has been the story of my life; one plodding step followed by a pause then another step in (hopefully) the right direction. Steven King I am not but I can still produce stories….and have for some time now.

My first novel was written in 1973 over a period of one year. Five days a week after a long day at the office (marketing and selling television programs) I retreated to my office (second bedroom) and pounded away on my trusty old L.C. Smith typewriter.

Most evenings produced roughly ten pages over the duration of many hours. Then the next night, each of those ten pages were edited and rewritten all over again. On and on it went until the story was completed. A second western was written a year later. Both languished in two binders until 2005 when the first novel was scanned onto floppy discs (remember those?), rewritten on a Mac then transferred to a word document and finally rewritten on a PC. It lay dormant for another year or two and was finally resurrected then as my first serious attempt at novel writing.

After that first novel became ‘Apache Death Wind’, another storyline captured my imagination. ‘Love in the A Shau’ was a semi-autobiographical story of my time in the service and my first love. It first germinated as a 56-page treatment and finally wound up as my second published novel. After ‘Apache Death Wind’ and ‘A Shau,’ another novel entitled ‘Debris’ began to fester in my brain.

After Sharon and I had been wintering in the Coachella Valley for several years, I’d become a native in mind and spirit. The mountains had become background to my early morning runs and afternoon bike rides. Our cache of friends has grown to include folks from around the country. Our neighbors became real people who watched our house and we watched theirs. Downtown was seldom frequented unless company was in town.

L.A. became a two-hour Sunday morning ride to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and Laguna Beach became a weekend destination for long beach walks and ocean side fantasies. Other times, Joshua Tree and the high desert beckoned us with its vast expanse of nothingness.

Somehow, I knew there was a story there but couldn’t quite grasp it yet. Old Palm Springs had long since faded into a vapid memory to the oldsters still around town and the new Palm Springs hadn’t yet shaken itself out of the recession.

Palm Springs wasn’t the small village as some natives liked to imagine it nor was it a mecca for the rich and famous like down valley. Palm Springs was a storied history book of Hollywood lore, scandal and glamor. But that was its past. Its future was still being debated in the Desert Sun, Chamber of Commerce meetings and during the cocktail hour in many backyards. I wanted to tell the story of old Palm Springs but in the context of a new Palm Springs arising from its ashes. But where and how?

The title came to me several years ago as I was walking by the Greyhound bus depot in down-town Palm Springs. The depot has since been moved to another location but at that time it was a gathering spot for those folks one wouldn’t normally see in Palm Springs. Those were the homeless folks and vagrants as well as sundry folks whose only means of transportation was the bus. A thought jumped into my mind: “They were all just debris from the West Coast.”

Fair or not, the label stuck and I began to wonder about those folks who have ended up in Palm Springs because that was as far as the bus would take them. Or perhaps they came here in hopes of a new career or a new start on life. I began to imagine what kind of folks end up here because there is nowhere else for them to go.

The tall striking blond who claimed to have just flown in from India where she was doing charity work. She kept reappearing day after day at a local coffee shop, always dressed in the same clothes and asking about jobs in town. She was beautiful, mysterious, and probably diseased.

I can’t count the number of older men who came into the place, digging into their torn pockets for change for a cup of coffee. Their odors linger long after they’ve left. Some of them have dogs that smelled better than they do.

The tourists, often foreigners, also looking for their morning fix and a taste of the other side of

Palm Springs. I began to build a cast of characters who would populate my novel. Each would bring a different story to those pages. It would be stories of love, betrayal, ambition, lust, and death.

It would be another side of Palm Springs. The everyday lives of people not associated with the green golf courses, the shimmering blue pools, the magnificent mountains, the glamor of Hollywood and the hedonistic sub-culture of some folks who come to visit.

It would be about real (in my imagination) folks who live in paradise but fight hell in their lives more often than not. But it would also be about the longing for love, the fight for survival, the quest for sanity in an insane world, driving ambition and painful betrayal. It would be the flip side of the Palm Springs that the tourists never see. And I hope it would make for one heck of a storyline. ‘Debris; the trilogy’ was the result.

That then was the beginning. It seems like an eternity ago. ‘Apache Death Wind’ turned into a trilogy as did the ‘Debris’ series. More plays, screenplays and blogs kept piling up. A skinny little hippo named Waleed nudged his way into my writing as did a comic strip featuring the grandchildren.

Each carried the same DNA. Small tentative steps followed by a rough outline that slowly morphed into something more tangible and interesting. Now several novels have their own accompanying mini web sites. ChatGPT is a ready reference to the increasingly complex and challenging craft of story-telling and writing.

It all began many years ago during those long winter nights, huddled over a typewriter and trying to tell a story that captured my imagination and hopefully that of future readers. One step at a time like eating an elephant.

What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

Vietnam was the defining war of my generation. As much as rock and roll, sexual freedom, the role religion was going to play in my life and a host of other revelations, Vietnam was always there like background music.

I served in the U.S. Army from March, 1964 through March of 1966. Those two years were neither good nor bad. I did my time, always managed to have some kind of side hustle, followed the rules and kept my nose clean. I ended up a sergeant but had no desire to make the service a career. I have no regrets for time served and a lot of good, silly, memorable and poignant memories of my time in khaki.

This summer, I watched the Ken Burns documentary series on Vietnam for a third time. Each viewing was more revealing than the last time. It reminded me once again of how I dodged that bullet but left a cache of ‘what if’s’ and ‘only’ to fester in my mind for a lifetime.

While I was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco and looking for adventure, I volunteered to go to Vietnam. Fortunately, or unfortunately, at the time, the Army was getting more than 500 applications a month for that overseas duty. A week before my discharge in 1966, the Army pulled out that long since forgotten application and promised me that if I reenlisted, they would guarantee me a plane ride there within the month. I politely declined their invitation.

When I began my post-retirement career as a writer, I decided to recreate that chapter in my life when the pre-Vietnam / post-Army scenario played such an important part of my growth and development. While I never served in Vietnam, one of my first novels featured a protagonist who did serve time there and took me along for the experience.

Love in the AShau was a semi-autobiographical, fact and fictional account of my own experiences during that period of my life. I tried to capture in words the visceral and emotional journey it had been for me.

The story began when I dropped out of the University and immediately got my greetings from Uncle Sam. My next two years had been decided for me and I had no choice. After a cursory physical (and ignoring my flat feet) it meant gathering up at some federal building by the capitol and a good-bye to civilian life as I knew it.

Then just before dusk, began a long and monotonous bus ride from Minnesota down to boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I could still feel those emotions welling up in the middle of the night as I thought about my sweetheart and all my friends safely ensconced in their beds, dreaming of their bright collegiate futures ahead of them. I had derailed my own college career and was tumbling into an abyss of the unknown.

What kept me going for two years was the illusion of that first romantic entanglement, harboring wonderful fantasies of our future together and then ultimately experiencing the painful realization that it was never meant to be.

Watching that Ken Burns documentary unearthed my journey in the military all over again. For reasons that gradually began building in my subconscious, I came to realize that writing that novel was an exhilarating as well as purging experience. It was a journey back in time that had become a soul-cleansing experience.

Then, sixty years after the fact, I returned to my old barracks at the Presidio of San Francisco. It was part of a journey arranged by Brian and Melanie to celebrate my eighty years of pondering life’s ‘what ifs?’ Our journey began where my military life was born and ended on the beaches of San Diego a week later.

Standing in front of the barracks with my two kids brought up a plethora of mixed emotions. I was still tramping around this planet; a lot of my barracks buddies had passed on. Some were brought down by the conflict overseas; others made their eventual escape back to civilian life and the rest simply disappeared.

Back then, we all slept in the rock-hard cots on the second floor. Some dreamed of home, of overseas duty and a few like myself imagined a storied adventure awaiting in Southeast Asia. Most of those dreams never came true except for the grunt from Minnesota who eventually made it to ‘The Nam’ and came home to write about it. The imagination is a wonderful tool for taking journeys like that.

If You Live Long Enough

Easter Sunday when good Catholic boys and girls dress up in their finest outfits to impress each other and grandma. Oh, the memories that old French church in downtown Saint Paul bring back. If you live long enough, you can see it still there but everything else…gone.

So many of the landmarks, monuments and buildings that played wallpaper to my youth are gone now. Their history now exists only in old black and white photos. Decades of growth, change and development have effectively erased many of the landmarks that surrounded my life back then.

I was born and raised in Saint Paul. Even though I now find myself in a third-tier suburb out of the city, most of those memories are still back there. I can go back and find connections all over the city, watching the curious and sometimes neglectful changes the city has gone through in mostly subtle but profound ways.

I think where you grew up, to a certain extent, can define who you are and what you’ve become. It can be a reflection of your values, interests and affiliations. Old Saint Paul isn’t a bad place to be from. So, while you can’t ‘go back home again’ figuratively speaking you can revisit those places that impacted your life in so many profound ways.

The first home I vaguely remember was on Smith Avenue. It was a tired old duplex that never survived the creation of the United Hospital complex across the street. Then there was a six-plex apartment building near Irving Park. That structure also succumbed to the realignment of the neighborhood. Little Sisters of the Poor is still there but in a new building and mission.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a new house my mother built by herself in the Highland Park neighborhood. Her total cost of materials, not counting free labor from her brother and the cost of the foundation, was eight thousand dollars. Awhile back it went on the market for more than a quarter of a million dollars. My, how times have changed.

The list of my own landmarks now gone is numerous. My grade school was torn down a couple of years after I left. My high school, once an all-boys military school, has gone co-ed. My college was an all-man’s private college. It’s now a D 1 co-ed university. The original Twin Cities Public Television building where I began my career in television and video production is now the Minnesota State Fair headquarters. A jog over to East Saint Paul brought even more surprises.

I can still remember my Aunt Clara’s house in East Saint Paul and her favorite watering hole, the Viaduct Bar. How, at seven or eight, I somehow picked up that she and her husband frequented that place, is beyond me. But they did and I must have overheard it from my mother.

We didn’t go to see my aunt often but it must have been enough to imprint in my pea-brain. A recent venture back along old East Seventh Street brought confusion and amazement. That whole neighborhood is gone now. No more viaduct bar. No more viaduct bridge and no bridge abutments. Years ago, the resulting road alignment either erased Aunt Clara’s house or put it where I never could find it. Nothing there has remained the same.

Even the venerable village of Dinky town, famed for Bob Dylan’s coffee house start, fraternity panty raids and my own late-night romantic liaisons has morphed into something totally different.

What had once been a rundown artistic bohemian neighborhood has slowly evolved into a sad morass of fast-food chains, a university t-shirt shop, a drug store turned frou-frou restaurant and a poor excuse for a coffee shop (circ. 2013).

Even more development is now threatening to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of edgy urban living. All in the name of progress.

Not far from the debris that Dinkytown has become is an empty lot where a rundown hovel I affectionately called my ‘broken down palace’ once stood. It was my first apartment building after returning from my sojourn abroad.

That whole period in my life was really a preamble for things to come from career choices, traveling, friendships, writing and finally love and family. The building itself, like my apartment inside, would never meet code today. But it did provide me a place to sleep, a place to write and a place to experience life on so many different levels. It’s where my first venture into poetry and song writing began.

My unit on the second floor of that rundown relic had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. One hundred years earlier the building had been someone’s elegant home on University Avenue. By the time I moved in, it was a chopped-up, divided, subdivided and probably illegal set of apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent.

There was a group of Pakistan students’ downstairs. They were all graduate students who were probably as suspicious of me as I was of them. I don’t know who lived on the other side of my living room wall but the nighttime noises indicated it was either Charley Harper or one of his protégés. The front of the building housed a strange assortment of folks who came and went with such regularly they might have been renting by the evening or weekend.

The overall mantra of the place seemed to be “Say Hi,” don’t ask questions, and ignore what’s going on unless you think the place might burn down. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. I thought of my place as bohemian chic. Visitors might have had a different impression. Shortly after I moved out, they tore the building down and replaced it with a new General Mills Research Lab.

My girlfriend at the time was a Mexican American girl named Susan. She was vivacious, outgoing, ambitious and shared a lot of my own dreams and aspirations. One of those ‘ships in the night’ I was lucky to pass along the way to adulthood.

Having found the spot where Susan and I once sat on my creaky back steps and waxed philosophically about life and love and the future, I thought I might venture back and try to find the house of where she used to live. My meandering route through that neighborhood was just part of a much larger circuitous bike ride that particular morning. There were still a lot of good memories lingering back there in the hood even after all these years.

I was about to give up my search when I rode past an old red brick row house and immediately recognized it as the spot where I used to turn left to go to Susan’s house. Even after fifty plus years, the memory of that trail marker still stood out like a homing beacon. Now I knew exactly where Susan’s house was. Only it wasn’t there.

A large apartment building had taken up a good part of her old city block. Not surprisingly, at some point back in time, a developer had come along and put up an apartment building where Susan’s house used to stand.

While I didn’t find Susan’s house, I did find something more profound. Just as Susan’s house had disappeared under the guise of progress and development, so too had most of the other vestiges of my existence back in that neighborhood. Everywhere I rode, the old buildings were gone or had been refurbished into something else.

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar was the flash point for the burgeoning music scene centered on the West Bank. Since they didn’t card, the bar attracted a lot of U of M students. I’m guessing the term ‘jail bait’ was first coined there. Not me, I either went there alone or with Susan.

But beyond the surface of that melting pot of hippies, junkies, college drop-outs, undercover cops and other assorted flotsam from civilization, came a wonderful collection of lost souls and seekers. Every night brought another stimulating conversation with some colorful character who usually gave a false last name, lied about their background but presented fascinating suppositions on life and love and war and college and our future in general. It was a true college education outside of the classroom.

The bar died in the 70’s along with the whole hippie scene. The Triangle Bar building became a phycologist's office. That period in my life which I’ve euphemistically labeled my ‘lost years’ encompassed a lot of lost real estate, friends who have come and gone, several women I truly cared about, and ultimately a lifestyle that has sustained and nurtured me for many years. The loss of those buildings was probably the most visible manifestation of my own change and evolution.

Deep down, I never really expected to find anyone or anything there from my past. The only place still standing is the duplex where Sharon and I first lived when we got married. Still, I’ve got a couple of pictures, fragmented memories and just enough foolishness left in me to think of it as a great period in my life. A time when I was young and dumb and poor. What better ingredients to fertilize the mind of an aging writer. Now that I’m old enough, oh, the stories I could tell.