by Julia Scott
Finally come to the ocean. Sound of water over stone. It is getting light.
And then I know. You are out there on the rocks.
Huge boulders with sea gushing into crevice. Searching, searching for some sign. Some difference among the boulders. Something that will tell me you are there.
I see silver bullets in the sand.
And there you are. On a rock. A ledge. On your back.
Shot through the head.
Naked. The whiteness of your body a perverse contrast to the steady brown of the stone.
You are dying. And I have never loved you more.
I reach out to you. Touch your face. Whisper your name. You open your eyes. Say my name. Smile. Your eyes are the color of bottle green glass washed up by the tide.
I am aware of the strength of my feelings. Seeing you vulnerable on the rock. Unprotected from cold. Wind. Water. The feeling is so intense I see it as a color. Gold. Deep, swirling gold. Flows from the hand down through the fingertips to where I touch your face.
And although I know there are other bodies out there on the rocks besides yours, I don’t move. Don’t want to move. Don’t care about them.
Just want to be near. And touch you in your weakness. And be the name you call when you open your eyes and feel the cold slab of stone underneath your back.
And remember where you are.
JANE GANAHL
LOVE POEM FOR A TRUE HIPPIE
JANE GANAHL has been a journalist, author, teacher, editor, and arts producer in San Francisco for thirty years. She is the cofounder and codirector of Litquake, the West Coast’s largest independent literary festival. She is also the author of the memoir Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife, and editor of the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age. She has contributed essays to five anthologies and has written for Salon, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Ladies’ Home Journal, Huffington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and many more. She is unfortunate in that much of her early newspaper work is archived.
The first and only writing group I ever belonged to was a loose one created in 1967 with friends in high school for the purposes of sharing our embryonic attempts at the written word. I was fifteen. One friend specialized in short love stories featuring Neil Young as her paramour. My specialty was poetry. I started with hippie-eco-warrior tomes—my favorite poem blasted the county for paving a freeway through the bucolic hills I lived in—and moved on from there to poems about my crushes.
I went looking for my folder of teen poems recently and was pleasantly surprised that, while gushy and shallow as teenage girls are, they have a nice dramatic tension to them, and a definite Honors English vocabulary. This one was written for a guy named Bill Spangler, who reminded me of Peter Tork of the Monkees and was in all the school plays. He was, with long hair and tattered jeans, a True Hippie—compared to this aspiring one—and I would swoon when he walked by and deigned to smile. The hot album of the year was Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, which provided the soundtrack to both that tumultuous political time and to my love life, or what passed for it. The Pillow song “How Do You Feel” spoke to the writer’s anguish at being tongue-tied when encountering a crush: “Oh, how my heart beats, I don’t even think I can talk . . .” Exactly.
—J.G.
TODD OPPENHEIMER
LETTER TO THE DRAFT BOARD
TODD OPPENHEIMER works as a journalist at the Writers’ Grotto, a San Francisco collective for freelance writers, filmmakers, and others devoted to the narrative arts. Oppenheimer has written for a variety of newspapers and magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He has received multiple national awards for his writing, including a first prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and a National Magazine Award for public interest reporting for “The Computer Delusion,” a 1997 cover story Oppenheimer wrote for the Atlantic. He is the author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, which was a finalist for IRE’s investigative book award.
In the fall of 1971, when I was nineteen and in my first year of college, living in a high-rise dorm at UC Berkeley, I got a notice that I was up for being drafted into the Vietnam War. This meant that I, an innocent preppie, might have to join hordes of America’s teenagers in an adventure that, let’s just say, I was not exactly cut out for. This, I could not tolerate. So I sought the only escape that seemed feasible: I filed for deferment as a conscientious objector to the war.
I also got a lawyer—a bright young man whose father was our family rabbi. My next task was to write a brilliant essay. I had to prove that I had a long-standing religious belief system, or some equivalent set of deeply held moral values, which rendered me incapable of engaging in war—of any kind.
No problem. That winter, I sent the draft board fifteen neatly typed pages, which went into my feelings—in full. In the interests of space, I will restrict myself to a few excerpts, as follows.
The nature of my anti-war beliefs is based on a deep respect for the magic in humanity that has been brought out by my main interest in life. This interest of mine is the Theatre. I spent this past summer in the American Conservatory Theater’s Training Program, right here in San Francisco. It is from the personal interactions that I watched and went through at ACT that my beliefs about human beings were strengthened and clarified.
After an actor has explored the internal processes of characters he has represented, he is soon rather taken with the magic and wonder of the human spirit that is literally impossible to kill with any sort of indifference. This demand that acting requires of you has led to me to discover, enjoy and respect that part of human beings that is much too beautiful to kill with such warlike indifference.
Since I attended ACT, I have come to value, above all, the richness of human emotion. An actor, at an early stage in his training, is often told to observe people. For a while, I had to consciously remember to do this. But for about a month now, I have found it an automatic part of me.
I feel that my experience with the intensely alert and dedicated artists at ACT has been a religious training; a training that has gelled my religious convictions. These religious beliefs have given me a love and concern for the magical part of human beings that acting explores. And if one loves that in humans, then how can one kill a man with whom he’s never even shared knowledge of each other’s souls? For surely if you are going to kill a man you ought to have had time to explore that man’s internal life, therefore having at least developed a fairly justified hate and then still have a very good reason to say in essence, that you are more deserving of a place on earth than he is.
People are far too worthy of personal and spiritual exploration to go through a war destroying those whose spirits have so much to offer. I do not believe you can even lightly judge a man, much less kill him, if you never even took the time to know him and find out his personal values. War is a judgment—war is not self-defense.
* * *
To me, this seemed argument-proof. When I showed this essay to my lawyer, he paused, nodded sagely, and said, “Who knows? It might work. It’s different.”
A few months later, I got a letter from the draft board, with a card inside that was marked 4F—a medical deferment. I immediately drove to my lawyer’s office to give him the news. We both whooped it up. And then, just as I was leaving, I asked him what chance he thought I’d really have had with my conscientious objector application. Without a moment’s thought he put his right hand out and gestured, thumb down. “Whoa,” I said. “Why?!” He looked at me for a minute, and then he said, “Because, at this point in the war, the draft board is sick of educated Jewish kids who can afford a lawyer.”
—T.O.
PO BRONSON
EAT WHAT YOU KILL
PO BRONSON has authored seven bestselling works of nonfiction and fiction. He has won nine national awards,
including the PEN USA Award for Literary Journalism and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Outstanding Journalism. He is a founder of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.
I wish I could use the first-pancake excuse, but I can’t. For this wasn’t my first attempt at a novel. That first one, written longhand into spiral journals on a West 87th Street couch, was at least in the genre of domestic realism. A love story set in the Manhattan art world, my tale was unreadable but it was not unmentionable. At parties, I could describe the book in ways that made it sound vaguely compelling.
Nor was I naive about that first one: 125 pages into typing it up on an old typewriter, I came to a cold stop. I stretched a rubber band around the belly of the manuscript and buried the thing deep in a drawer. It was time to go get a job, a real job. I told myself I’d come back to it in a few months, which became a few years. I don’t regret that one; I’m actually proud of the fact I was wise enough to cache it like a time capsule and disentangle myself from its faux ambitions.
But this one, my second one, has me grasping for excuses. Rereading its overstuffed sentences, I wonder if it had something to do with the Macintosh.
Remember when the Mac arrived, and you could not only edit sentences ad infinitum, but you could lend prose some persuasion through the careful choice of typeface? You could give your sentences that Garamondian flavor. Hushed sincerity could be imparted with the angled strokes of italic! Poor wordsmithing could be covered up by making it look intentional with a little Old Antiqua here and there. Those were the days . . .
My sentences, though. Each a contraption. Only the sort of thing that could be constructed with the benefit of the word processor. It was as if I were being paid extra for every adverb, and double bonus for every run-on.
Here’s just the opening line:
Leaves parachuting from delicate limbs breathing and stretching and swaying in autumn rhythms, dancing as they fall this fall in tune to winds and the gentle breezes from the top of the mountain.
The whole 230-page novel is like that. I was working on Wall Street at the time, in bond sales. This novel was the Opposite World I escaped to every night. By day, I barked numbers into squawk boxes. At night, I penned lyrics of prose. By day, I was on the forty-second floor of a downtown glass tower, surrounded by electronic screens on all sides. By night, I vanished into the setting of my novel: the forest.
Oh, and all my characters were animals. Here’s the list of characters, from the frontispiece:
List of Characters
Darmot, a marmot, the defendant
Weasel, the prosecutor
Raven, a vulture, the judge
Nyrpatta, Darmot’s younger brother
Tumratha, Darmot’s wife
Wolverine
Pika, a small rabbit
Capira, a lynx and Nyrpatta’s friend
Otta, a river otter
Goby, a pocket gopher
Tharnyx, a falcon
Capira’s father
The jury
Yes, it was a legal thriller, a courtroom drama. It was Scott Turow à la Watership Down. It was Animal Farm, but rather than on a farm—the Rockies!
The conceit was that a marmot had behaved not very marmotly. Marmots are basically big squirrels who whistle. Marmots are not predators. Sure, they’ll steal a bird egg. But they’re cuddly nut hunters. Not beasts. No tooth and claw.
This particularly intelligent marmot had murdered in revenge, intentionally, using poison and trickery. He had upset the Natural Order of Things. So he was being brought to justice. That was the grandiose theme of my grandiose novel: Was it wrong for an herbivore to go all savage now and then?
A friend at the investment bank asked to read it. A few weeks later, I asked him if he’d started it. “Oh yes,” he said. “It’s the best book about Wall Street I’ve ever read.”
Now, the most embarrassing part: I didn’t just write one draft. I put the book through three separate drafts over the next eighteen months. Every time, I had the chance to back away; instead I doubled down on my investment. In fact, that year of rewriting is the stick by which I measure wasted time. When I duck into a pizza place, hoping for a quick slice, and after handing over my money I learn it’s going to take ten minutes to bake it—I cast back to my second novel. When I think about that girlfriend I should have broken up with, I indelibly call to mind my second novel. When I think about flying home for Christmas, only to do nothing but watch TV and eat—I ponder the even greater waste that was my second novel.
I used the manuscript to get admitted to the creative writing program at San Francisco State. I thought at State I would hone the novel to the point of publishing glory. But the first day of school, I had a meeting with the program director. He read aloud to me from the first page of my manuscript:
Slipping under fallen branches, some broken arm of a friendly spruce, soaring over sorrel and laurel, like a fish I once saw in the water, jumping over every several steps above the breast of the water, flying for a second like a great kingfisher pelican, swimming the next like a steelhead salmon.
“You know what you need to do with this novel? I recommend you put it in a drawer for a year or two. Come back to it then, if you feel like it.”
—P.B.
PETER ORNER
I DREAM OF WARM PLACES
PETER ORNER is the author of two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, and two story collections, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories. Orner’s stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, the Believer, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and twice won a Pushcart Prize. He is also the editor of two nonfiction books, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. Orner is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Not only don’t I really recognize the person who wrote the stuff that follows, but I’m not sure I ever knew this guy at all, which sounds weird because it’s me, my handwriting, my little narrow-ruled notebook from the early 1990s—and yet as I read it, this notebook I’d been hauling around with me for years, and not to get all heavy here, but I felt the weight of the years in my own goofy-ass prose. We die not one death but hundreds. Who is this poor idiot sitting at the McDonald’s eating a McLean Deluxe and spouting off nonsense?
Why anybody else would want to read this, God knows. For a few sporadic months back in 1992, I kept a journal. It was the only time in my life I ever did. I got bored of my own dopey thoughts and gave it up soon after. What I’ve wanted, what I’ve always wanted, is to inhabit the thoughts of other people, which is why I take a little bit of solace in that, as interested as I am below in myself, I also spend time watching and thinking about the meter maid and the bearded man. Kill me if I ever write a memoir.
I was waiting tables in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The restaurant was in a mall out in East Cambridge and, if I remember, was called Rayz Riverside Café, a crappy place with a lot of neon and sad razzle-dazzle, kind of like a slightly more upscale TGI Friday’s. Eventually, I got fired, and I remember stomping off into the snow with an apron full of cash and credit card receipts. I considered it my unemployment compensation. But at the time I wrote this stuff I was still working there and on a break and apparently slipped out to McDonald’s for lunch, which strikes me as odd since I worked in a restaurant.
—P.O.
Oct 13, 1992:
In a McDonald’s with fifteen minutes to tell my hopes and dreams and fears. I suddenly feel very weighted down by this McLean Deluxe. A bearded man who looks like a little a white Fredrick Douglass just struggled up to me and asks me I had a smoke. No smokes, I said. The manager is trying to toss him out right
now. At least the guy knows what he wants, a cigarette. That’s what he craves. At the moment I am not nearly as focused. I crave money. I crave adventure. I crave respect. Power and finally when it all comes down to it love. A parking enforcement officer just sat down in the next booth. She must be a regular because she keeps greeting everybody by name. I have never seen anything like this, people being so friendly to a meter maid. They must not own cars. Anyway. I find it difficult to write about myself directly. And who can write about love without it sounding like a cliché. But I find it difficult to imagine that anything could be better than decent, honest, actual love. Honesty I guess that’s something I crave also. So when I do discover this love I seem to crave, I will for once become honest to her and myself. In the meantime I will continue to search for something to cling to in my life. The parking officer is back. She is talking on her walkie talkie and blowing into her hands to keep warm. I fear death but I guess this is natural. But I also fear becoming ordinary, perhaps even more than I fear death, I fear averageness, I fear not making a mark, fear dying without accomplishment. But who is the judge? The bearded man just called the manager “a fucking yuppie with your fucking tie!” The manager just jumped on the bearded man’s foot. These two could go at it for hours. It’s a standoff. The bearded man isn’t budging. The manager is standing with his hands on his hips. Here come the cops. They’re going to take him to the Pine Street Inn. He’s walking with a limp now. He says he was hit by a car. The bearded man leaves. I stay. The manager is satisfied. The parking lady begins to nod off. Chilled by the opening of the door, I dream of warm places.
ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN