Road Rage vs. Marilyn Monroe - an excerpt

 

The following is an excerpt from my novel The Healing of Howard Brown, 

published by Baby Bingus Books, Aug. 2016.
Now giving away e-books in exchange for reviews!

I can picture what happened next as if it happened yesterday. I was just about to head north off Sir Francis Drake onto highway 101, but to fetch Tripp I had to go south. I looked in the rear view: there was just enough space to cut over a couple of lanes and get to the southbound exit, so I put on my blinker, shoved my gorilla arm out the window and hit the gas. Still, there was no way to avoid cutting off a couple of drivers, who started honking, naturally. Then I saw this one driver – a red-faced Fu-Manchu dude with mirrored sunglasses and an Oakland Raiders cap in a junior-sized blue Ford Ranger – getting really pissed, shouting and flipping me off violently. So, like I always did when I upset a fellow driver back then, I blew him a kiss. This was a bad idea: Mr. Fu-Manchu got so close behind me on the freeway onramp that I thought he was going to bump me. Then he pulled up alongside, shouting unintelligibly through the open passenger window. He was so close I could see the throbbing blue vein in his red forehead, but I just kept blowing him kisses like I was Marilyn Monroe on the stairs of an airliner, bidding adieu to her adoring fans. What the world needs now is love sweet love, right? Well, I was giving it to Mr. Road Rage, who I could now see had a shaved head under his mesh-top Raiders cap and was just getting more and more infuriated. Then he made his move: he cut in front of me diagonally so I had to swerve to avoid him in the heavy Saturday afternoon traffic: brake lights flashed, horns blared, tires squealed and I could see several vehicles fishtailing behind me to avoid a pileup.

“Holy motherfucking shit that fucking cocksucker almost killed us all!” I hollered, dropping back in traffic until the blue pickup was out of sight. Feeling like I was having a heart attack, and realizing that I had been out in the big, bad world very little in the five years since my retirement – driving around Marin appeared more dangerous than ever – I took the next exit and pulled into a parking space beside a Chevron Extra-Mile mini-mart, thinking a beer or five on top of a little oxy would calm me down.

“Dad!” I heard Trip’s tiny voice. He sounded like the little boy that couldn’t seem to scream “DAD!” loud enough. “Dad are you there?”

“Buddy! I can’t find the phone!” I shouted in the general direction of where his voice had come from under the driver’s seat. All the swerving around on the freeway had dislodged the phone from its harness. So I opened the door and, knees on the pavement, fished around under the seat, then did the same under the passenger’s seat. No phone.

“Dad, I’m over here!” I could hear him chuckling as I peered between the passenger seat and the center console. There it was, wedged in snug and cozy. I lay my plus-sized gut across the driver’s seat with my gargantuan ass sticking out the door and tried to liberate the phone while Tripp reported on fishing conditions at the Yuba. “The water is pretty low, and it’s been a pretty dry summer up there, so we’re gonna wanna look for pools with deep channels where we can just swing a fly right across the bottom.” With the mention of “bottom” somebody gave my ass a powerful, violent shove that pinned me against the seat.

“Hey! What the fuck?” I shouted, trying to get up, but whoever it was had squashed my crotch against the electric seatback control. Suddenly, my wiener was in charge; a little shift against the button I could recline or incline the seat.

“You’re some hot shit race car driver, ain’tcha?”

Oh for fuck’s sake, I was thinking. It’s the shaved-headed Oakland Raiders fan, Mr. Road Rage. He has tracked down my custom-designed Saab and is going to chop my balls off, then jam ‘em down my throat.

“Dad?”

“Hey, Buddy,” I said, bemused. “There’s a fella here trying to buttfuck me in the Chevron parking lot.”

“Shut the fuck up, fag!” growled Mr. Road Rage, shoving me even harder. He stunk of beer, gin and vomit so powerfully that I felt a sympathy barf welling up. I also recall worrying that the asshole had a gun trained on my bald spot, which I was told existed but had never seen.

“That’s him, the buttfucker,” I reported.

“Hey, you shut up, asshole!” Tripp shouted, picking a fight from the cell phone stuck between the seats.

“Turn that fuckin’ phone off, dickface.“

“I can’t! It’s stuck between the seats!”

“Yeah, can’t you tell, shit-for-brains?” Tripp yelled. I could imagine the sneer on Tripp’s face.

Then I felt this giant upwelling of superhuman power as I shoved my angry wiener against the seat control, inclining the seatback as forward as it would go, which enabled me to get a grip on the sides of the seat. With a bloodcurdling war whoop, I pushed myself back against my attacker who, with one foot on my ass and the other on the ground, lost his balance and fell backward, his acrylic Raiders cap bouncing on the pavement. I spun around, ready to blanket him with my immensity, when two uniformed mini-mart attendants blasted out of the double glass doors side-by-side like Butch and Sundance, arms waving and yelling “Stop! No fighting here! No fighting! You must stop!”

Instead they stopped, about 10 feet away from where I stood over the vanquished butt stomper. The station managers were looking at us as if we were combustible materials.

“Why for you like fight?” one of them shouted, almost melodiously. My rage was draining and my crotch was throbbing.

“Dad? What the hell is going on there? Dad?” Tripp yelled. The station managers were now studying my Saab, marveling at the odd configuration of the driver’s seat.

“Sir,” one of them said, “your phone. Somebody is talking.”

Mr. Road Rage was snickering and hissing like a Disney anaconda.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said to both of them, avoiding the gaze of Mr. Road Rage, who was probably fifteen years younger than me and pretty good sized, a kangaroo to my grizzly bear.

Mr. Road Rage hopped up from the ground and brushed himself off, glaring at me while he hissed, “You are such a fucking fag. You wanna kiss me now, asshole?” His sleeves were rolled up over the elbow with a dragon’s tail stretching across his freckled arm. His face was still fire engine red. I paused to retrieve the phone, telling my son that I couldn’t explain it all at the moment but would call back later.

This was not how I had planned to re-enter the world. After five years in relative hibernation – on

the patio with Mr. Booper, at 156 Woodland with parents, caregivers and my frequently ill-mannered sister, and in bed with Sandy – I had forgotten that even marvelous Marin County streets and highways were tinderboxes of pent-up frustration and rage just waiting to explode, like my new acquaintance had just demonstrated. I briefly contemplated going home and calling off the search – I was grossly unprepared for the dangers of American highway culture – but then an alarm went off inside the mini-mart: a half dozen kids were making off with bags stuffed with as much mini-mart crap as they could carry, mostly twelve-packs of Bud Light. The station managers were after them in an instant. I jumped in my car and ducked behind the dashboard. But these kids were hardly dangerous. Instead they looked like the backfield for the Redwood high school football team: ripped dudes with crew cuts, tattoos peeking out from under tank tops, shorts falling off their asses. I got the feeling that the theft was more of a prank than a serious robbery – they probably didn’t even open the cash register – so I got out and hobbled behind the running security team, when along came Mr. Road Rage from behind, streaking across the blacktop to where the guys were jumping into the back of their truck, one kid ripping the gas hose out of the tank. The station managers and I froze as the all-star wrestling Fu Manchu maniac hooked an arm around the football player with the gas hose and slammed him into the side of their big boy pickup truck, beer cans erupting out of the twelve pack in a glorious explosion of golden suds. One of the other kids jumped out of the pickup bed onto Fu-Manchu’s back, wrapping his legs around his waist and whomping on his shaved head with a free hand while Fu got the other football player by the nape and was banging his forehead into the passenger side window. Just as the glass shattered into a million tiny shards sparkling against the blacktop, my phone rang.

“Dad!”

I went running back to my car, which waited with the keys still in the famous between-the-seat Saab ignition. “Hey Buddy you won’t believe what is happening here.” I described the scene, which, as I pulled out of the Extra Mile, had developed into a sort of scrum with Mr. Road Rage Fu Manchu getting the shit kicked out of him by a half-dozen beefy teenagers. By the time I turned into the freeway entrance, the kids were peeling out of the Extra Mile and the station managers were attending to Mr. Road Rage on the ground who, I supposed, got more fight than was originally planned when he followed me into the parking lot, as had I. And the real search for Sisi hadn’t even started yet.

I drove back into the flow of freeway traffic, headed to Tam Junction and the Shoreline Highway that would take me out to Bolinas. Soon I would lose cell service. I scanned my rear view for the blue Ranger, paranoid as always that some random nut case out there would pull up alongside me and blow my brains out with an assault rifle, or toss a grenade into my lap. “I’m gonna lose you in a little bit,” I said as I crested a hill past Muir Beach and met the broad aquamarine expanse of the Pacific, but Tripp was already gone.

That particular stretch of Highway One, after the road climbs out of Muir Beach to the ridge, revealing the craggy cliffs that fall into the seething foam of the ocean, has, in its arresting panorama, always forced a moment of reverence and reflection. Instead, on that particular afternoon, I found myself imagining how I would have loved to pop Mr. Road Rage’s bald, red head like a big pimple. Terrified by my own violent visions, I started to wonder: what am I getting into here, and why? Was leaving my patio, my chucker, Mr. Booper and my wife’s broad, creamy bottom worth a harebrained boondoggle for the sake of fostering some final family harmony?

Then, as if Baba Ram Dass had started dancing on the hood of the Saab chanting “be here now,” I finally came back to where I was, gazing across breathtaking blue-on-blue stretching across the Pacific Ocean into infinity. I wished my father could see it. I wished my son could see it. I wished my wife could see it. Most of all, I wished my sister could see it. At least then I would know exactly where she was.

Want a free e-book version of Howard? Drop a line to babybingusbooks@gmail.com and leave your email address!

Now on Amazon in print and e-book

Writing What I Know

An old friend commented on a chapter from the novel I'm currently publishing to the web, Learning to Limbo. He said: "How do you come up with this stuff? It's amazing!"

"I lived it," I replied. And it's true. Much of Learning to Limbo follows Mark Twain's advice to "write what you know."

Such advice might seem sorta stupid. How can we write about things we don't know, right? On the flip side, there's this quote from P.J. O'Rourke:

“Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered  the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp.   Please, talented scribblers, write what you don’t. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?”

(O' Rourke's example isn't the best: Homer was more of a compiler and adorner of campfire stories that had been around for centuries than he was an originator of those stories.)

One of my favorite novelists, Saul Bellow, based much of his fiction on real life experience. With the exception of  Henderson The Rain King, (Bellow's hilarious meditation on anthroposophy), Bellow's novels follow the arc of his own life, from the youthful Adventures of Augie March, into middle age with Herzog (Bellow really was cuckolded by his wife and best friend), on to his 60s with Humboldt's Gift (he really did have a friendship with a poet, Delmore Schwartz, whose life closely mirrored the character of Humboldt Von Fleischer). Even Otto Sammler is a mouthpiece for Bellow's philosophy in his later years.

John Irving fans know that he tends to include much of what he knows – wrestling, New England, Vienna, private schools like Exeter, his experience as a professional creative person (writer, but also actor, organist, children's book author etc.) – in his novels. Sometimes reading an Irving novel is like spending a week at his summer house going through family photo albums, over and over. To some, Irving may be a case of "write what you know" run amok. 

I'm not nor ever will be in Bellow's or Irving's league. In fact, it wasn't until I was 45 that I began to conjure real stories, often inspired by events in dreams and blended with my own experience. 

Hack

In my first published novel, Hack, I put a portion of myself, and my life, into the body of my best friend, the late Ted O' Connell, and turned him into an unemployed landscape painter named Henry Griffin. I do, in fact, paint landscapes, often while listening to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. 

What else did I write about in Hack that I knew, or was actually true in one form or another?

I really did have comforting dreams about my childhood sweetheart, who appeared to me as sort of an angel. I used her physical characteristics for Hadley Scofield, but what I knew of her adult personality didn't give me enough to go on, so I embellished. We really did play with Sherri Lewis puppets in first grade: Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, and we refer to each other by those names to this day. 

Mr. San Anselmo is a real person, though I haven't seen him in years. His real name is Mark. And all Marinites should know that the character of Razor Rick Morgan is a blend of George Lucas and Metallica's Kurt Hammet, or one of those other emperors of Lucas Valley. 

I have never driven a Fat Boy or even been on a Harley, but the Hadley Schofield character really did race motorcycles in her youth.  We did drop Orange Sunshine at Alpine Dam, several times. And I'm told that a spinet was dumped off the damn into the reservoir in the 70s. 

Russell Chatham is a real painter, though I don't know if there's an exhibit at the Oakland Museum that's dedicated to California turn-of-the-century plein aire painters, or if E. Charlton Fortune's work hangs there. 

The only access to the cabins on Pinecrest Lake is by boat, or footpath. It is true that women's menstrual odors infuriate bears. Also, there is a golf resort in Tubac, AZ, which I've played several times. It is where the first half of the movie Tin Cup was filmed. 

I really did have a bisexual girlfriend, once – a Francophile – though I can't claim to have participated in a "frisky three-way." And there was an art gallery on San Anselmo Ave. next to Ongaro's Plumbing: The Bradford Gallery. 

And the rest of it: Karl, Rex Wilcox, Cyril, Herte, Barbara Bassett, etc. is all imaginary, though based in varying degrees on people I know or have seen in the movies. The plot is entirely imagined as well, though I admit to borrowing the disguise idea from the movie, Mrs. Doubtfire (RIP RW).

Learning to Limbo

Unlike Hack, most of the setup plot in Learning to Limbo is autobiographical. I was out of work as a result of a startup going belly up, and we did move from San Anselmo to Indianapolis as described, even though I had a job offer from Sun and could have stayed.  We did have a close friend die from ovarian cancer, and she really did refer to herself as The Practical Princess. 

We did live in a wonderful four-poster in Wellington Heights, Washington Township, Indianapolis for about a year. The outfit I joined in Indy was subsumed by it's parent, and we really did move to Ridgefield, CT. My son is really a naturalist and teacher of primitive living skills, and I really did fancy myself a songwriter for many years. I built an awesome treehouse in Connecticut, but nobody fell off the deck. 

The rest of Learning to Limbo is made up. Basically, I took this cross-country professional odyssey and used it to satirize the corporate experience. I also used it to juxtapose the banality of corporate existence with human experience: family drama, affairs, and other things that matter more than corporate double talk. I haven't read up on how much an author should admit to being real in a work of fiction, but I do know that readers can tell when an author is writing from a place of personal knowledge, even if that knowledge is of something imagined, or not.

The Healing of Howard Brown, and others

The novel I'll publish next, The Healing of Howard Brown, is autobiographical in the sense that it attempts to work through the shock, pain, confusion, grief, and general altercation in the state of affairs following the deaths of one's parents. I experienced all that and more in 2008/2009 when my parent's checked out, along with a fair amount of inelegant behavior in the remaining family. But, like Bellow's attempt to work through being cuckolded by his wife and best friend in Herzog, the setup or situation is just a backdrop. Like a theater set, it provided me with context for the dispositions of the characters, as well the rich soil needed for the seeds of conflict to sprout and flourish. And, while The Healing of Howard Brown draws a great deal of inspiration from my labyrinthine Southern ancestry, the actual "healing" of the protagonist is, I'm sorry to report, purely fictional. 

Based on my experience to date, I can say that those stories that draw from my own life could be considered "low hanging fruit." The settings, the imagery, the characters, and to a lesser degree the plots of my first three novels are drawn from experiences that, being mine, are always relatively close at hand. I wouldn't go so far as to say that drawing from my own experiences has made it easier to write, but I would say it gives my imagination access to events, and people, and the associated imagery and emotions, that are immediate and close at hand. 

The other current novels in various stages of disrepair – Chasing Byron, Bury Me With My La-Z-Boy, and The Bolinians – are almost pure flights of fancy, though the historical references in each of them are real enough. 

Chasing Byron, set in the same locale of eastern Louisiana as Part II of The Healing of Howard Brown, challenges the historical fact that Byron Nelson won 11 consecutive PGA tour events in 1945, a record that still stands. It attempts to be both a portrait of the postwar, Jim Crow South, and a fantasy about The Gods of Golf and their supernatural influence on the protagonist, young Wyatt Johnstone. 

Bury Me With My La-Z-Boy was begun during NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) and is a combination genre mystery and zombie thriller, also set in eastern Louisiana. The Bolinians, which is in it's infancy, is historical fiction that chronicles the adventures of a traveling band of Russian/Miwok dwarves and their Russian leader (and biological father), former fur trader Dmitri Pavlovich, as they interact with the real people and historical events of Northern California in the19th century. 

I don't know if the low hanging fruit novels, where I am "writing what I know" in a relatively strict sense, has made those stories any better or more engaging than the stories that are more removed from my direct experience. Hopefully I'll be around long enough to find out. It's always possible that some other idea will come along – like the "aspirational" story of the old man, given a year to live, and his band cronies touring the USA in a Country Squire caravan. I suppose that there's only so much writing we can do about what we know, since there's only so much we can know. Then again, a new dream is born in my overly noisy noggin almost every night, and if I can just remember to jot a few things down there may be limitless things to know and write about. Until, of course, there isn't. 

Read Learning to Limbo, 

online and in serial, 

right here, right now!

*********** 

HACK, on Amazon