Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (7 page)

* * *

I have stopped writing children's literature. At my age, it's become too dangerous.

PLAY GOING

That was me at sixty-two, an old guy with satchel-like cheeks from the gravity of age and sadness. And this also was me, a gentleman bucking the trend of inelegance. I was off in Ferragamo brogues, worsted wool pants, a checkered pink shirt with a blue tie, and a cashmere sweater. The pants were usually closeted, upside down like a bat, while the sweater lived in a drawer with its arms folded, as if mad.

Midway through the first act of this heralded English play, I had already completed my yawns and finished scrubbing my eyes. To keep alert, I frisked my pockets. For a second, I confused a button for a breath mint. The Kleenex, ready for a good cry, would remain unused.

I studied the six other theatergoers, all with half-light on their faces as if they, too, were part of the drama onstage. The scuffed furniture was more moving than the actors — but what should I have expected from a half-priced matinee? I left at intermission, blinking under an overcast sky, and walked three blocks through the Tenderloin, where drama lives in every other doorway. When someone sang, “You're a dog,” someone else responded in castrato, “Yeah, but what kinda dog?”

Now
there
was a line to remember. And here was an
actual
line at Glide Memorial Church, with men the color of pigeons waiting for the soup kitchen to open. I hurried by — and fast — when a brother crushed a beer can in his fist and sneered at me. Wisely, I unknotted my tie and pocketed it — why be colorful in a discolored neighborhood? For a daring second, I imagined this brother and me as the leads in a one-act play, something like
The Odd Couple.
I would be the debarred lawyer (insider trading), while he would be a former body builder (wrecked by steroids).

I found my car keyed — a long line across the driver's door.
Urban terrorism
, I thought to myself, grateful that I had brought our older — and discontinued — Saturn. I should have stayed home to finish reading that book on Wittgenstein, a philosopher of wishful thinking and a nasty colleague in departmental meetings.

I drove away from that uninspiring afternoon with the phony playwright and reflected briefly on my own phony years. When I wrote poems without heart and plays with characters that sounded as if they were screaming through toilet rolls — they were that hollow. I remembered a few of the bad lines from my absurdist play,
Space Junk
.

MICHAEL
(reads from textbook very slowly)
: George Washington cut down a cherry tree on the side of his log cabin. Later, he freed the slaves.

MISS GRIFFIN, TEACHER
: Very Good. Now, Madison, you continue.

MADISON
(reads slowly)
: Benjamin Franklin wore really neat glasses. He saved a lot of pennies in an old sock. He was married and sometimes lived in France.

I winced at the memory of these lines — what had I been thinking? It was me who was absurd, not the play.

It began to sprinkle as I neared the freeway entrance that led to the Bay Bridge. When an outright rain blurred my windshield, the wipers came on with the beat of a metronome. I wasn't happy, figuring myself a failure who couldn't even choose his entertainment correctly. I drove east and contemplated tossing my watch into the bay. I was done with time, and done with out-of-fashion plays, including my own.

In slow traffic, I listened to a soft rock station, hearing the word “love” uttered twelve times in the space of four minutes. I watched two gulls hang in the air, their wings flapping now and then to keep themselves afloat. Then another song on the radio recalled a line uttered by a friend from the past: “Love is eternal . . . as long as it lasts.”

With the traffic now moving, I shifted from second to third gear, and then risked fourth, the most dangerous act I would make all day. The traffic cameras, mounted every hundred feet, eyeballed me as I sped through the S curve at sixty.

At home, I read more on Wittgenstein and learned that academics were able to whine in several languages. They were a nasty, pipe-smoking lot. I began to believe that the best way to get through life was by the Golden Rule. I petted my cat, a remarkable creature in his tenth life who once climbed trees just because; now arthritic, he can't even climb into my lap. I lifted him up and confided into his much-bitten ear, “I went to the theater today — not good, little fella.”

The rain stopped and the gutters ticked. Evening arrived early, but I left the blinds open — let those on a walk mull over a man with a cat in his lap. The cat eventually meowed to be let out, but not before I stroked him three times and patted his head twice. I drank a fairly cold beer and reflected on how I would never be like that brother on the street, so strong he could crush his can and blow it back into shape with one long breath.

If only someone like him could have breathed life into the characters of that heralded one-act play.

* * *

I left the Phoenix Theater and a gasping 1950s existential play in which a teenager strikes out on her own for New York City then returns home, disenchanted by the Big Apple. Her splashy artwork had failed to supply enough tortured drips on triangle-shaped canvases — or something like that. My bones moaned real pain from sitting on an unpadded folding chair. My eyes seeped and my tongue, like a small whale, rose and fell inside my closed mouth. In short, I was bored. I couldn't grasp the play's absurdist intentions, though I had donned my thinking cap and devoured a Milky Way bar at intermission — the sugar had sped through me like a drug, forcing me awake.

In the night air, I was depleted of yawns, both real and not real. I wasn't fond of the young actor in the play and believe that she didn't think much of us theatergoers either — not once did she cast a glance at the dozen-or-so of us. Now there was absurdity. You memorize your lines and go twice weekly to rehearsals, all for an audience of empty chairs? I could recall such indifference myself, of course, having read my poetry to both padded and unpadded chairs. I've even done a reading where the host of the reading series tiptoed away before I could finish the last poem.

I trekked toward Sutter Street and my car, which was neither absurdist nor existential. In fact, my car was a vehicle with scratches, dents, and a little more than half a tank of gas, with tires that had rolled thousands of miles over bumpy roads, and insects that had paid dearly in the grille.
I'm alive
, I brayed inside. A pulse jumped in my wrist every living second and my heart churned blood, one cycle, then the other. I was a realist: in ten years I might be dead. In fifteen, that possibility was even more likely. And in twenty, a stone rests on my chest and I'm down below, dressed in any of my English suits. I'm a shoeless cadaver, with no place else to go.

Plays would still go on, however, with or without people in chairs.

At that misty hour, the homeless were real and with us. Some tottered solo on gimpy legs, while others maneuvered in pairs. Some were drunk or, if not drunk, impaired by real infirmities. In a doorway, a trio argued the merits of a high school diploma over a
GED
. When they spoke, cigarette smoke poured from their mouths — or was it cold breath?

I was approached by a woman with a disfiguring hump on her back — no, the hump was a cat on her shoulder. I was not in the least surprised when her wicked smile displayed only two or three teeth, none of them front teeth. Her hair was like a disheveled wig and her shoes were splayed at the tips. She stunk at the distance of five feet. The poor woman, I suspected, had been injured by drugs and drink. For a second she reminded me of Janis Joplin, that raw singing talent of the 1960s. Where would Janis be now other than in the shape of a woman turning her face from me? The cat on her shoulder was fast asleep.

At another corner, with one arm deep in the sour contents of a garbage can, was a Jerry Garcia look-alike, including a beard tinged with gray. “Dude,” I could have whispered. “What happened?” His pants were the color of ash, and his jacket was inside out. For warmth, he wore a second pair of pants inside the first; still, the outer pair hung off his butt the way teenagers' jeans do. I couldn't help but recall the hippie bumper sticker of a cartoonish shoe and the nearly faded words “Keep on Truckin'.”

This was street theater, for which you paid next to nothing, coins only, maybe a dollar bill if you felt charitable, a doggie bag from your dinner at Lori's Diner — that's all, that's all. There was Jerry, and Janis, and now Jimi Hendrix, intensely studying his grimy fingers at Mason and Bush Streets — all the lost souls of the sixties. This was my generation of burnouts pleading for their daily bread. If, in the city wind, a single sheet of newspaper flew down the street like a ghost, it would be filled with obituaries. Our names could be among them.

SHAKESPEARE & ME

The pen pusher with the doily-like collar, the forehead scrubbed bald from creative worry, the pointed nose sniffing for language both highbrow and low . . . he must have had help from others. The master couldn't have written all those plays and sonnets, one brilliant work after another, with such an inexhaustible display of genius and commercial sense.

I dispute this rumor. I picture — through my own sepia lens — Shakespeare straining to write in a tavern by candlelight, backstage at the Globe Theater, or in rooms smelly with wet hay. I see him in his abode, indifferent to his urine (and his lover's urine) in the corner pail. His quill busily scratches out lines on parchment. The ink is dark and his fingers are stained from his literary pursuits. I see the master sidestepping beggars and yokels, not in the least pained by the sight of a fluttering hen on a chopping block. He has somewhere to go and something to do. He must make his living solely by his wits. And let's forgive him his indifference to family: in a thatched cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, his long-suffering wife pokes at a fire. In the yard, his forgotten children play.

Some scholars attribute much of Shakespeare's output to Francis Bacon, others suggest that Christopher Marlowe also came to the rescue. A fellow at Oxford argues that Sir Walter Raleigh penned his later works and that maybe, just maybe, the Countess of Pembroke was involved. I've even heard it argued that Queen Elizabeth was the playwright of the histories. Not true, of course. But, like Shakespeare, the queen was a wit — both on and off her throne. I recall her quip when a lady-in-waiting scolded, “Queen, your hands are so filthy!” Elizabeth might have turned her hands over for a quick inspection, or she might have kept them on her lap. Those details have been lost, but her words were recorded: “You think my hands are filthy. You should see my feet.”

All the world's a stage, but some scholars should get off it and go home. Shakespeare was a genius who wrote his plays and verse. He also produced, bankrolled and, in a pinch, played minor characters. He lived, loved, and died, and his indisputable masterpieces survive for all.

I'm no Shakespeare. In fact, considering my difficulty in placing material in magazines, I'm not certain that I'm a writer at all. Nevertheless, I deliver a story here about an incident in which my own authorship was once called into question. It was after a night of drinking, a night when I resembled a Shakespearean fool among other fools. I woke to our landline telephone ringing. I stared at the scolding instrument, then picked up before the answering machine could click on. A woman on the other end whispered, “Gary?”

Depends
, I thought in my heart.

Without other introduction, the caller said, “It's me, Alma. Remember me?”

I replied without seriousness, “Alma, is that you?” Then I sat up in bed. I couldn't locate Alma in the Rolodex of my injured brain. I should have stopped after that first six-pack of domestic grog.

“You remember?”

I couldn't say I did, though I remembered I was home because my cat was looking at me. I answered, “Yeah, of course.” My old cat had mustered up enough leg strength to jump onto the bed.

“We were in the same class.”

Same class?
The cat nudged my ankle, his engines of pleasure starting up. I gave him a scratch and got out of bed. I managed to shove my feet into my slippers and pad down the hallway in direction of the kitchen.

“You wrote book?” she asked. “You really wrote book?”

Wrote book?
Must have been first grade, I reasoned, that's why she'd left out the article from her inquiring sentence.

I told her that I had written several books and said that I couldn't stay long on the phone. Unlike Shakespeare, I did not sleep with a pail in the corner and — though I didn't say this — I had to relieve myself urgently in the toilet down the hallway. But first, I had to feed the cat.

“Why are you calling?” I asked, immediately wincing at this crude phrasing.
What was wrong with me?
Oh, yeah, I was hungover.

“My husband, he died,” she stated flatly.

Husband died?

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear this . . . Alma.” I moved the phone from one ear to the other, more attentive now, and worried. I did my best to conjure up her image — was it the girl with ponytails in business math, the class for those who couldn't handle algebra? I had been one of the top students there because I used my fingers to count.

But Alma ignored my sympathy. She said that she remembered me from elementary school — and from junior high and high school — and didn't believe that I could have written book. She remembered that I was sort of no good in school. She also remembered that I had been bullied by Bobby Lopez — did I remember him body-slamming me against the chain-link fence? Briefly, I revisited that fence, along with the playground where the bullying took place, then recalled that Bobby had shanked his brother in the garage while playing cowboys and Indians.

I couldn't argue with her memories. I also couldn't argue with her notion about my academic performance, seeing that I had flunked third grade. (I was back on track within a day, however, after the principal appeared in the doorway yelling that our desks were needed and we were now in fourth grade.) I had been a prominent member of the dumb row in sixth grade and eventually graduated from high school with a 1.6
GPA
, starting my community college education in the lowest of English classes.

“Did you write book?” Alma asked.

“What?” A headache was knocking on the door of my frontal lobe; it found me home. Bending down, I poured cat crunchies in a bowl.

“
You
did it?”

This is where I compare Shakespeare, a great author of beautifully wrought and timeless verse, with myself, author of some stuff that gets into literary magazines which last two or three issues. Alma was asking if I had really written book or if another had ghostwritten book for me. She was having trouble imagining that dunce from her childhood and adolescence producing single grammatical sentence let alone book. It didn't seem plausible.

“That's right, Alma,” I told her, adding that I was an author and that she should read book. I was even going to suggest an easier title of mine when she said, “My husband . . .”

That's right, I thought, her husband had died. But why did I have to know this?

“. . . he was eaten by a shark.”

My black-and-white cat was meowing; he wanted to climb into my arms. I shoved the tuxedoed fella away.

“By a shark, he was eaten. The shark got away.”

Shark got away?
I was starched with fear. Was I hearing right?

Alma told me that her husband had gone fishing and been the unfortunate victim of a shark attack. It had occurred two years ago. Had I read about it? It was in the newspaper.

My heart picked up speed, ushering blood through its many valves. The blood that ordinarily lingered near my ankles was now climbing to my heart, passing through its muscular chambers and moving on to other organs, splashing them with vital nutrients, oxygen, and other stuff I can't claim to know about. I was wide-awake now, under the influence of a cocktail of adrenaline and fear. I looked out my window at the lake, imagining a shark cruising hungrily beneath the surface. Where was my cat? A second ago, he had wanted the warmth of my arms; now I needed him.

“Oh, Alma,” I said with sincere lament. “I'm really, really sorry.” Yes, it must be the girl with ponytails from business math. Had we learned anything except how to add the prices of items on a supermarket conveyor belt?

Then came the request. She asked if I could write her husband's life story.

Nervously, I told her I couldn't. It wasn't for me.

Wasn't for me? More crudeness!

“Why?” she asked, her voice businesslike and almost stern. “He was a nice man! He treated my boys nice. My mom is still alive. He treated her nice too.”

Again I told her how sorry I was, squeezing my eyes shut, as if in pain. In a moment of clarity, I told Alma that such a story was best circulated among family and loved ones. It was a story to share with the young people, so they could learn how unpredictable life was. Then I mumbled nonsense and became dry-mouthed. I said that her husband was without question a really nice man and that he loved life — until, I thought to myself, he'd been eaten by a shark. No matter how I tried, however, I could not compose the necessary language. I was no Shakespeare; in fact, I was hardly a B-minus poet. Words of comfort failed me.

We talked for a few more minutes. Alma told me that she had two grown children by her first husband, and a younger boy with her late husband. She now lived alone in Chandler, Arizona, near Phoenix. She said that she remembered me in a fifth-grade spelling bee, defeated by the word, “Yosemite.” (Later in life, when I began to write poetry, I would be defeated by other words.) Our conversation ended with sincere good-byes.

After we hung up, I sat, head bowed, clutching a dishtowel. I said a small prayer for Alma and her late husband. A few minutes later, I got up and looked worriedly around the kitchen, while the refrigerator hummed. Was this incident — a call from a former classmate, a person named Alma — trying to tell me something? Poor woman, she couldn't form a proper sentence. Her first husband had been unlovable; her second was lovable but dead. Had she really been the one in fifth grade who helped me spell “Yosemite” by mouthing the letters silently from across the classroom?

Shakespeare wrote his works, every word in his own hand, while wearing that lacy collar-thing of his. In my own button-down collars, I write all my words too, even these, which may strike some as implausible —
BS
, let's call it. They may even strike the reader as clumsy — but who cares? I got that call and with it the chance to reacquaint myself with a classmate from nearly fifty years ago. All the world's a stage, but when a shark climbs aboard, every actor — or almost every actor — exits in a hurry. It's strange out there, and sometimes this strangeness finds you hungover, early in the morning.

But, eaten by a shark?