After that, I was no longer a contract writer for MGM, but the hit writer of a hit film that was earning me more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the first time around. The second time around, I turned the script into a novel which went Book of the Month, and became a national bestseller that netted me another quarter of a million.
However, my next wager with myself was to triple the money I'd earned in Hollywood, and do it quick as a wink. So I gave myself ten days, and wound up at the track where I met another one of those mysterious strangers who put his finger on the well-penciled program, and said: "If you want my advice, put all your dough on Dixie Girl."
"Dixie Girl," I said, "are you sure?"
He drilled me with his eye.
"Sure I'm sure," he said.
Somehow, that haunted shadowman with the piratical eye seemed to be another of those oracles of the moment, and I took his words as pure gospel, and put three-quarters of a million dollars on Dixie Girl.
Then, I sat down and awaited the outcome.
At the far turn Dixie Girl began to run over the other horses; she began to eat them up. She was out in front by at least six lengths. I figured the next thing that was going to happen was a chorus of angels singing Hallelujah over my head. For I believed, right then, that I was the champion writer-gambler of the whole world.
And then...
Some mechanism in the great void went awry.
Dixie Girl, the winningest horse that ever was, tripped and fell, shattered her right foreleg.
That was the end of that poor inglorious horse; as well as the end of me, the luckless writer-gambler, who was now all but broke.
In fact, I was right back where I started--only worse. My luck was gone. I soon discovered that I could no longer write, and though L.B. still believed in me, and offered me a shoebox office at a hireling's wage, nothing came of it. I was shot dead with that poor horse, Dixie Girl. As she went down, so did my fortune, self-esteem, and writing talent.
For the next ten years, I lived in grubby hotels, and made a helter-skelter living any way I could. I traveled around a lot. Whenever possible, I gambled, for I was given to gambling; and gambling, sad to say, was given to me. However, the losses were no longer large. They were as thin as my output as a writer, which is to say, non-existent.
Enter the Mouse.
Enter the Play.
Enter two acts, save two pages, of the best writing I have ever done.
Exit the Mouse.
And there I was, staring wearily at the rose-tinted dawn, wondering what was next, when...
--Enter the Tiger.
He padded up to me, looked balefully into my eyes, and whispered, "Lune."
The Tiger was orange and black, the latter color laid out in perfect stripes of infinite harmony. And with that one word, "lune," the Tiger cancelled the despair of the moment.
"I don't get it. Don't you speak English, like the Mouse?"
The Tiger said, "Purr."
Its enormous tigery eyes were the color of the golden dawn.
"Purr," it repeated.
"Oh, well," I said."
"Purrrrrr," it replied.
Then it struck me that the Tiger was talking Tiger.
"Are you a friend of the Mouse?" I asked.
The Tiger said, "Purrrrrrrrr."
For quite some time, the tiger and I looked at one another. Then, slow-blink, it looked away, perhaps at a painting on the wall; maybe, though, at nothing, because tigers are fond of looking at nothing, and then pretending that nothing is something.
It occurred to me in a flash that with the advent of the Mouse, I had achieved hope. However, with the entrance of the tiger, I had something greater than hope. What I had now was faith.
Yes, with the entrance of the Tiger, faith.
I sat down at the small desk in room 125, on the fifth floor of The Great Northern Hotel in the great city of New York, and my fingers were poised expectantly over the keys. Then, as I began to make thunder, I saw the Tiger lie down, and begin to purr.
I stopped thundering.
The Tiger stopped purring.
I tapped a key, making the letter 'T'.
The Tiger rumbled an incomplete purr, which rattled, and stopped.
Then I knew what the Tiger was, and I began to thunder again, to draw order out of chaos, to bring light into the dark, to make precise that which was imprecise, to glorify the absurd, and make ridiculous the sanctified.
And the more I pounded those keys, the louder the Tiger purred, so that it sounded as if I were typing in a garage with an idling diesel rumbling next to me. Knowing myself to be a poor, weak, and burning fool, as well as a great, raging, and wonderful scribe, I pummeled the keys of my typewriter, and made the small Corona dance well into the morning. And always, the Tiger's purr was louder than the thunder of the keys.
And now you know why the Sage, at the end of my Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Way the World Goes, closes Act Three by saying, "The Tiger within whose name is love."
A Rose for Charley
Hurricane Charley supplied me with a lot of ink and even a Best National Column Award for "Rose" -- but more than anything else, Charley gave me a sense of patience and courage in dealing with a natural disaster on its own terms. We stayed home for a category five with all of our animals -- Great Danes, Siamese cat, European Shorthair, Blue-Fronted Amazon Parrot, Dachshund and a host of unseen geckoes and Cuban tree frogs. Seems like the animals taught us more than we can ever repay: thanks to each and all, and especially to Charley, one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history, for sparing us.
The day Hurricane Charley churned across Pine Island Sound and did a mad, destructive dance in Bokeelia, we were in our kitchen expecting the worst. From between the storm shutters, we peeked at the wind-whipped froth that sent bass from our pond hurtling through the air. Wingless bass flying through wind-bent, earth-pressed paperwood trees. No dream of life ever seemed more surreal. However, when Charley tired of sawing up slash pines, there came a dripping, dew-bright moment that was the eye of calm, the eye of false peace. Then after the ripping and the raging continued for a while, Charley seemed to get bored with woods wrecking and roof-pulling, and he spiraled out across Indian Field and then into Charlotte Harbor, whence he made his way, as everybody knows, to Punta Gorda.
We came out of our bolthole, blinking at the new world that lay before us.
It was indeed a brave new world, for which the phrase “wrath of Charley” has no significance. Mainly because it doesn’t describe the haunted, unleaved, and in many cases, bare-barked trees. Or the canopies of vines woven into a tornadic tapestry that swung dreamily from the broken stalks of pines and palms.
A new world, yes. A wet and gleaming world that bore no resemblance to the Garden of Eden we’d shuttered off just two hours before when we locked and bolted ourselves into our house.
Miraculously the house still stood.
But it had taken a battering. Lorry and I, after counting our blessings, fell to that other preoccupation--counting our losses. This began with tropical trees, hand-planted so many years ago, to such things as shingles, soffit and fascia. The pool enclosure, so much a part of the house itself, was gone, much of it blown into our pond at the same time the bass were blowing out, most likely.
Anyway, it looked incongruous out there, like the spars of a black ship rising from the gloom of the green swamp.
I looked all around; nothing seemed familiar. Everywhere, rising from the plangent earth in ghosts of steam was the burnt, bruised fragrance of ripped roots and crushed leaves.
At last my eye fell on something known, something dear. A scraggly little rose bush that lived by our lanai. Its bony back was neither bent nor broken, and, unaccountably, there was one bright red-orange rose popping out among the purplish leaves.
“Hey,” I cried out to Lorry, “here’s a little guy unbeaten by Uncle Charley.”
We stooped to admire the hardy little bush. Its brittle bark had been s
tripped clean of the lichen crusts that we’d been too busy to scrape off all summer.
In reverence, I touched the blossom, and it toppled lazily onto the ground. There was a sad second where I stared in disbelief. Then, turning away from sadness, I fetched the flower, and with a smile of hope, gave it to my wife.
She christened the flower, Hope, and put it in a crystal shot glass filled with water. And so we went about our lives that day, readying ourselves for the great indoor camping trip that would begin and end in our own house two weeks later.
During the day, however, I often spoke of the rose. How Charley had brought it forth. So, from destruction, creation. From bombs bursting to buds breaking. In The Bhagavad-Gita, the classic mystical work of ancient India there are these words of rapture that express what I was feeling.
You are the gods of wind,
death, fire, and water;
the moon; the lord of life;
and the great ancestor,
homage to you,
a thousand times homage!
I bow in homage to you
again and yet again.
That evening another miracle occurred: the phone rang.
The power had been out since Charley’s blue eye had gazed on Bokeelia. We were without power and water. In addition, the phone line—pinned down by fallen pines—was lying on the ground.
Therefore, we jumped when the phone rang.
I approached the receiver as I had the rose—gently. The sound as I pressed it to my ear was that of a hollow shell at the beach. A kind of OM. Then I heard the bright yet distant voice of Kelvin, our horticulturist friend from Trinidad.
No one knew the dark demon Hurucan better than Kelvin.
The first thing I said to him was, “How did you do that?”
“How did I do what?” he asked.
“Call us.”
He laughed, then said, “I heard you were having a hurricane.”
That seemed to say it all. Still, I was astounded.
“You got through,” I murmured.
“Yes, mon,” he assured me.
“How? Our phone’s been dead.”
“Love always gets through,” he replied, as unsurprised by the munificence of his answer as I was overwhelmed by its beauty.
We went on, then, to talk about what had happened. How Charley had been a very bad boy. How our house had held up. How so many others had not. Kelvin was the perfect person to talk to after living through a category four. He’d been through a hundred tropical storms and who-knows-how many hurricanes. He was so reassuring, so respectful and yet amused, so endearing, so wonderful that I forgot the seriousness of what we were up against—the grim aftermath, the insurance woes, the broken parts of our home.
I didn’t say a word about those things, though. Instead, I told Kelvin about the rose that bloomed in the midst of Charley’s winds.
“Are there no more blossoms on it now?” he wondered.
“She gave us all she had, I think.”
“No,” Kelvin said, laughing. “You must go out there and tell that brave rose bush how much you love her, and how many more flowers you want to see her make.”
“You mean that?”
Kelvin’s laugh, because it’s so deep and genuine, is infectious. I was laughing, too—for the first time since Charley. “Listen, my friend,” Kelvin said, finally growing serious, “tell that rose how much you love her. Tell her, and she’ll give you more blossoms.”
“Is that how you do it in Trinidad?” I asked.
“We’re in short supply of Miracle Grow, my brother. But there’s no shortage of love here. There’s lots of love in the things of this world.”
“So you want me to speak to a rose bush.”
“Yes, mon. “Tell her,” he continued, “how brave she was facing that wind all by herself. Tell her—well, tell her whatever you want but let it come from the heart.”
And with that, the phone went zzzttt, and then went dead.
In honor of our long-term friendship and Kelvin’s infallible wisdom when it comes to the things of this world, I went directly outside into our ruined garden, and did what he’d told me to do.
As I stood in the ruined garden uttering praises, a heron flew over the pond. A warm glow flowed through me. I felt so grateful for being alive. And somehow, even after Charley, I was still in love with Pine Island. It seemed at that moment, the most enduring place on earth.
The following day, we started to clean up.
However, by day’s grueling end, my wife and I were fumbling, tired, and hot. It was ninety two degrees in the shade. We were both staggering and the dog fence—so necessary in our yard with the Great Danes—was far from finished. I told Lorry, “I’m going inside to call the fence guy.”
She said, “With what phone? You know the line’s dead.”
I sighed, and looked to the sky. It seemed like it was going rain.
“Hey,” she said, “We can do this.”
Then two red-shouldered hawks settled in a broken-off pine tree a few feet from us. They bobbed their heads, as if sighting something. Then they froze and gave us a red-eyed, sharp-beaked stare that went into our hearts. After which, in two divergent yet equally strident shrieks, the hawks screamed at us. Maybe they were sounding off about the dismal, dark state of the world, but at that moment, I didn’t think so.
To me, it seemed, the hawks were talking to us.
And, out of respect, we listened.
They were such beautiful birds, a matched pair. Their shoulders were rusty-patched, each with a dark tail that had white bands on it. I’d never been this close to a red-shouldered hawk. After eyeing us and scolding us, both birds flew off, leaving the pine branch twanging behind them. Up into the Charley-polished air, the two hawks soared, and then, seemingly to underscore their message, they made a sharp and sudden descent, aimed in our direction. Each hawk fell in a series of perfectly turned, upside-down pirouettes. One roll after another, until, heading right for us, they broke off, singing that high song of angry triumph and crying despair.
I wiped the sweat from my eyes. Saying nothing, my wife and I finished fixing the fence. After seeing the hawks, we found silence more comforting than words. We just worked quietly and uncomplainingly until we were done. The fence, after we were finished with it, looked pretty good. Would it stand up to a galumphing Great Dane? We didn’t care. But as we were walking back to the house with our tools, I said, “I think they were telling us to get back up and fight.”
Lorry offered me a wry smile. “I think the lady hawk was saying we’d strung it up all wrong.”
“That would be the male hawk, saying that,” I told her.
“Not if they’re like us,” she replied.
This was an unfinished—and unfinishable—argument. No one wore the pants in our family, because neither one of us want to wear them.
That evening, like all others for the next two weeks, we bathed in our freshwater pond, and while we were paddling idly among the lily pads and amethyst lilies that encircle it, I saw a female anhinga drying its wings on the white trunk of a fallen paperwood tree. I knew this because of the bird’s characteristic tan head and neck. Both males and females, however, have black bodies with white plumes and silver edgings on the wings. The anhinga, or snakebird as they’re often called, sat in that emblematic pose--wings extended, head erect. Her pointed bill was yellow and straight, unlike the cormorant that has a descending, hooked beak.
She was so still she appeared sculptural. I swam close enough to gaze into her red-orange eye. Her sun-gilt feathers were the gleaming black gown of an Egyptian queen. Like the heron of the night before, here was another Pine Island blessing. I admired the anhinga as I treaded water among the lilies. I don’t know if she admired me, but I know she tolerated me. I could feel that she wasn’t afraid of me. Like the hawks, with whom we were somehow bonded, this ancestral relative gave us a sense of both timely and timeless confidence in the renewal of life.
“It seems
like a time of beginnings,” I said to Lorry. “Everything is destroyed, and yet reborn. Everything is known, and unknown. Nothing is timid or afraid. All things are what they are. Only one day ago, the creatures were as strangers. Now they are relations.”
That evening as we lay in bed trying to fall asleep in the oppressive night heat, the only sound was the far off barking of a dog, the nearby roar of a generator, and the crazy riff of a displaced mockingbird that kept waking up and singing for no reason other than joyousness.
We couldn’t sleep. A poem by Richard Wilbur kept filtering through my mind. Its title was “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” It was a poem about angels—things all around us that speak to us in the language of poetry and praise.
I told Lorry, “Angels are animals and birds, too.”
“Sometimes they are little rose bushes,” she added.
I thanked each of the flowered, feathered, furred and finned. For it was their love of life that had called us to the things of this world, and awakened us to our own inner strength.
Old Ben, Pam Snow, and the Blood of Summer
I wrote this one in 1993 and in 1995 it became part of a collection of stories Doctor Moledinky's Castle shaped into what I called a "hometown novel." As a whole it was a novel, a memoir and a collection of short stories all rolled into one. It came and went and got good reviews. School Library Journal and a committee of librarians selected for SLJs 100 Children's Books Too Good to Miss list. I was proud but the book was gone. And yet it lived on because of this story about a boy, a girl and a chicken farmer named Ben. The story was so popular at schools when I'd tell it, or read it aloud, that one day I observed a very strange thing. I'd read it aloud in a cafetorium in northern Georgia and when I returned to my home in Florida, I read in an AP news story that a group of kids in that same town where I'd just been were arrested for hypnotizing chickens. The first hypno-chicken cult in America inspired by a short story. Wow. How many authors have that honor?
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