Capers With Carroll

Fifty years ago, today, I boarded a flight in Los Angeles and flew to Luton, just north of London, UK. Thus began the great coming-of-age adventure of my life. My mother and my then girlfriend (Vicki, who has now been my wife for 49 years) saw me off at the airport. In flight, I remember the Rocky Mountains covered with a layer of golden-yellow Aspen trees, ice chunks floating in Hudson Bay, an hour in a duty-free shop beside a snow-cleared runway in Iceland, and the first rays of daylight as we took off from Edinburgh. I was 22, and—unlike today—I had been able to work my way through UCLA with no debts, and graduate with $1,000 in the bank.

I did not walk in the graduation ceremonies. Skipping those expenses gave me another hundred dollars for my voyage. Instead, I walked from my last final exam to a student travel agency and bought my one-way ticket to Europe. The other choice had been Japan, which interested me more, but five years of French would serve me better than my three quarters of Japanese. It was my plan to sojourn for a year in Paris. I would work on making my French useful, and write on the novel from which I had already shown Vicki portions over a year earlier. My last quarter at UCLA had been exhausting. During registration, a counselor pointed out that I had accrued 207 units, and once I went over 208 without graduating, I would not be allowed to register for another quarter. I had transferred in from community college with more than the usual totals, and then decided to add a kinesiology minor and creative writing classes to my history major. I also, wanting to explore what eventually became my career, took the ‘Education of the Mexican-American Child’ class in which I met Vicki. The gist of it was, to complete all my graduation requirements, I needed to take and pass 28 units my final quarter. I may have set the all-time UCLA record for most units to earn a BA. As I returned to campus after buying my ticket, I looked out on the sea of peers who were practicing for the ceremony. Was there even one person I needed to say 'goodbye' to? Vicki came to mind. Our almost-two-year relationship had been friendly, but not romantic, and I did not see much chance that I could find her in the crowd. I did see her roommate, who promised she would pass along my goodbye. My main activity for the summer would be two volunteer sessions as a camp counselor, one with teen diabetics and the second for kids who came largely from Los Angeles Chinatown, where I had been tutoring English during my time at UCLA. One preparatory task for that was interviewing the families for each camper. One of those families spoke only Spanish. I had not yet begun the Spanish which would later serve as my almost-competent second language, so I called Vicki and asked if she would translate for me. On a Saturday morning I picked her up and we drove to Chinatown, but the family was not at home. I knew there was an Asian-American culture fair going on that weekend at nearby Echo Park, so we went there to kill some time. The family still wasn’t home, so we drove to USC, where Vicki would be taking classes for a teaching credential. We did a lot of talking. By the time I got her home in the late afternoon (unbeknownst to me, she had a date she needed to get ready for), I had begun to rethink our relationship. We had a wild summer. By the time Vicki and my Mom dropped me off at LAX, I was much less sure that I wanted to be gone for the full year. As we parted, I whispered, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Fifty years ago, this week, and looking down at the Rocky Mountains from an altitude of 35,000 feet, the memory I retrieve is hundreds of miles of Aspin trees, in their September golden-yellow magnificence. Glued to the window two hours into my coming-of-age trip, I guessed first that the amazing sight might be blooming goldenrod. Then I realized the blaze of color was not flowers, but autumn leaves. Growing up in Los Angeles, I’d not had much experience with fall colors. Sadly, my useless little camera had no way to catch the grandeur nor the color of the Quaking Aspen.

After the goodbyes in L.A., my views of the western United States seemed mostly parched and drab. After the Aspen in Colorado, my next strong memory is chunks of ice floating in Hudson Bay, then snow piled beside the runway in Iceland. Finally, I saw the first hints of dawn while taking off for the last leg from Glasgow. Travel stimulates memories like no other activity I know. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I can reach back 50 years and recount my day-by-day events, conversations, and impressions for the three months of my travels. Then, I can contrast what I actually did with what I’d expected to do, and see how those experiences determined the rest of my life. It had been my original plan to take a brief look at London and then go to France. I would find a room, work on my novel, and finally learn the language that had eluded me through five years of high school and college coursework. Instead, my ADHD and ENTP curiosity would kick in. I would visit Wales, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, the two Germanies, Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Israel. I’d spend just the briefest couple of days in France, leaving me with French I still can’t speak, and I am now 50 years closer to finishing my novel. Dwarfing all that, though, I left home an agnostic—although intrigued—but came home a firm believer in Jesus Christ. Between now and Christmas, regular readers of my feed can expect to see me reliving the highlights from those three months, though I have several off-topic essays in process as well (see ‘ADHD and ENTP,’ above). Oh, and I’m working again on my novel. I hope many of you stop by.

Today I reached 60,000 words in my novel. That's about 220 pages of manuscript. Averaged over the 37 years since I put the first words on paper, that comes out to about 4.44 words per day.

Wow! That means I completed 38 weeks worth of writing, just since I got out of bed this morning. No wonder I'm tired!

(This will make more sense by beginning with Part 1.)

Almost ready to begin writing, but not quite . . .

During the summer (1970) between community college and UCLA, I rewrote the novel from the previous summer, and made a difficult—but what turned out to be momentous—decision. If Friday 10:03 is my first novel, then Of Runners and Poets would be my pre-first novel. Like in 1969, I organized my summer weeks into four twelve-hour writing days, alternated with three days of part-time-job, chores, errands, and having-a-life. I wrote in the bedroom I shared with a brother, a detached room behind my parents’ house. We called it the Hilton. While ordinarily, I live life on the run, with possessions and projects accumulating in great, shifting pile-a-mons, now, before I could write, I sorted and organized everything I owned. I constructed a large desk from a scavenged door and my filing cabinets, and I traded in my manual typewriter for a new electric one. The previous summer, each twelve hour day of typing had left my fingers bruised and swollen.

On days I wasn’t writing, much of my energy went into helping a middle-aged fellow named Pat. Pat had emphysema, and needed an oxygen tank by his side. Yet Pat hoped to spend whatever time he had left traveling in Europe. He ‘hired’ me (I never actually saw a paycheck) as a Man Friday to accompany him. He would pay all my expenses and $200/mo. I would stay with him until he died. Then I would accompany the body back to the States.

I desperately wanted to see Europe. We spent the summer getting my passport and getting organized. He was expecting a payout from a lawsuit against the Air Force, but progress seemed slow. He was in frequent contact with Sen. Cranston’s office, and made cryptic references to favors the senator owed him. But May became June, and then July, and as the summer ended, I had to make a decision. The UCLA quarter started at the end of August. If this trip to Europe was just Pat’s pipe-dream, I needed to be in school. Among other things, if I dropped out of college, I became draft-bait. Rather than Europe, I might be touring Vietnam.

I laid it out for Pat. “No problem,” he said as he reached for the telephone. He dialed Sen. Cranston’s office, commenting that this was an opportunity to collect on one of those favors.

Cranston wasn’t available. I had a night to go home and think it through. I wanted to go to Europe, and did not want to go to Vietnam. However, this was not how I wanted to escape the draft. I also had softly-nagging questions about the morality of the friends he talked about in Europe. What if I got over there as his ‘bond-slave’ and found myself in an underworld milieu? I told Pat he would have to find someone else. I was going to UCLA.

Thirty-eight years later, I look back and shudder at how close I came to disaster. Had I gone to Europe with Pat, I would be a completely different person today—if I was even alive to recount it.

(This will make more sense by beginning with Part 1.)

Before moving on to the period when I started, wrote 120 pages of my novel, and decided to set it aside for 35 years, I need to mention three teachers.

I mentioned in part two that from a 7th grade creative writing class, I gained a best friend and critique partner. For the next ten years, we took most of the same English classes and wrote together for various school newspapers. Outside of class, when Steve discovered Faulkner and Celine, I read Faulkner and Celine. When he bought Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, and Randy Newman, we’d go to his house to listen to them. He’d read what I’d written, and pinpoint the key facet I had missed. I’d read what he’d written and think, “I’m not sure what this means, but it’s brilliant.” Ten books later, I still see reviewers say, “I’m not sure what this means, but it’s brilliant.” Steve actually suggested that my talents ran more to poetry than the novel. He also said that, unlike him, I would end up a teacher, because I lacked the drive necessary to be a novelist. I recognized he would be a novelist, but I thought he should also be an editor and a teacher. Forty years later, I have been a teacher, though I’m back again to the writing. Steve has earned great respect for his novels, but is also recognized as a book, film, and music critic, and has written occasional political commentary. But I’m pleased that he has also become an editor and a teacher. He founded and edits Black Clock, the literary journal at California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches in the MFA writing program.

At Granada Hills High School, Steve and I took Advanced Composition from Martin Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman taught me how words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs, and ideas must appear on the page in logical sequences. As a teacher, he also set a standard that I have attempted to emulate, but always fallen short.

After high school, while I went to community college, Steve went ahead of me to UCLA. There he began to study creative writing under Bernard Wolfe. I joined him in 1970. I can’t even recognize Bernie in the web bios I can find. As I remember his story, he graduated from Yale with a linguistics degree in the early 1930’s, when there wasn’t much of a market for linguists. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, knew (but didn’t particularly respect) Hemmingway in Paris and Havana, and was sent to Mexico by the American Communist Party to help Trotsky translate his memoirs (and serve as a body guard while he was there). After Trotsky was assassinated, Bernie turned the experience into The Great Prince Died. Later he wrote a pioneering Sci-Fi novel, Limbo. He wrote a lot for Hollywood, and he was a great creative writing teacher. I loved to workshop a story—mine, Steve’s, somebody else’s—with Bernie in the room.

With these introductions out of the way, it is almost time to start writing a novel.

(This will make more sense by beginning with Part 1.)

Although justice, redemption, prisons, and the death penalty helped launch the musings that became Friday 10:03, several other themes animated my thinking, as well. In 1962, my aunt and uncle returned from two years in the Congo, and my aunt worked her way up to be International President of Laubach Literacy, overseeing adult literacy programs in sixty countries. We began to have African and South East Asian guests at our holiday gatherings. I began to take French. I became fascinated by the United States-as-melting-pot, just as that theory was about to fall out of fashion and be replaced with the U.S.-as-salad-bowl. In high school, I wrote a poem, “O’Henry’s Chinese Diner/Serves pizza on the go./Mrs. Schwartz, the hula dancer/Brings crowds to see the show.” A reader who looked at my murder mystery commented, “The cast of characters reads like roll call at the United Nations.” It’s still a tendency I have to consciously tone down. But it is also true to the life I have lived.

Majoring in history, I became interested in migrations of people, and how conflicts or adaptations occurred when cultures bumped up against each other. I read a lot of Carey McWilliams, who wrote during the 1930’s and 40’s about non-English-speaking immigrants and race relations in California. For a ‘History of Mexico’ class, I researched Japanese and Chinese immigration into Mexico. For ‘History of South America’, I wrote on Japanese living in Peru and Brazil. As a series of independent study projects, I wrote what was then the longest treatment in the English Language on the communities of Chinese living in Europe. I took a year of Japanese, and volunteered as an English tutor for new arrivals in Chinatown.

What makes for successful immigration? What are its pitfalls? In what ways do identities change during immigration? What forces impede those changes? And to bringing this back to Friday 10:03 and my other thinking: How often do our prisons serve as dust bins for the shards of immigration failures?

(Go to Part 6)

(This will make more sense by beginning with
Part 1.)
A fair question would be to ask what first attracted me to the story of Caryl Chessman. Much later, I spoke with someone who had known him in prison and considered him “pure evil.” Others report his brilliance and charm. That’s not really contradictory, because the most dangerous evil comes packaged with charm. What seems certain is that he was one of those individuals who actually do better in prison than outside. Inside for most of his adult life, he could never stay outside for long. Yet once he was back in, he rose to positions of trust. As a jailhouse lawyer, he may never be excelled. I saw questions about redemption, and where its thresholds might be.

Out of prison, Chessman supported himself on hold-ups, but was never suspected of murder. He was executed for a kidnapping he may never have committed. I saw questions of justice, and how a society could pursue it. Then, as I mulled a possible character from the Chessman story, I began to wonder: What would happen if—instead of my character becoming a jailhouse lawyer—he became a jailhouse guru, writing books that developed a spiritual following? In my own life, I was trying to sort through the questions—or even the existence—of religious truth, for which my character could be a vehicle. My story still had 40 years to shift and sprout new directions, but this is the ground from which it grew.

In the meantime, during the second summer after my high school graduation, I wrote a different novel, a murder mystery in the context of Vietnam Era draft evasion. The following summer, I rewrote it. Then I transferred from community college to UCLA and entered my novel in a UCLA student novel contest. My 512 page manuscript lost to a 30 page first chapter from a novel that never would reach page 100. I had to turn twenty-one without my Pulitzer, but I was learning valuable lessons about the writing life.

(Go to Part 5)

(This will make more sense by beginning with Part 1.)

Matthew 25:34-36, "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance . . . For I was . . . in prison and you came to visit me.'”

For a 16 or 17 year-old trying to figure out pure religion, this was a quantifiable test. As a 58 year-old, I can say I have been inside San Quentin twice for the purpose of visiting a Death Row prisoner, but I would have to admit my motives were not purely religious. Yet as a teen-ager trying to distill the essence of pure religion, this seemed to be one of the tests.

I grew up in a series of Methodist churches where I learned the importance of practical service. These were good people, doing good things, singing good music, and sharing good meals. My sense, though, was that they treated the Bible as a convenient mythology for holding a good group of people together. At the same time, my own reading of the Bible told me that its interior logic forbid such a treatment. Either it is true—in all of its statements of deity, eternity, Heaven, and Hell—or it is not. Where was the bedrock? On a “Youth Sunday” at age 14, I was invited to present the Sunday morning sermon. I thought I had pushed the envelope rather daringly, but got only polite congratulations. My eight-dollar short story for the denominational Sunday school magazine was the retelling of a Buddhist parable. In looking for bedrock, I found none at all.

Thus, at 14, though my body continued to inhabit the Methodist Church, my spirit went elsewhere. I read the Koran and the Tao Te Ching. But with my interest in Chessman, I returned occasionally to Matthew 25. I couldn’t visit a prisoner, but I could write a letter. In an act of Christian obedience, I wrote to the California Department of Corrections and asked for a pen-pal. In an act of administrative regulation, they replied that pen-pals needed to be at least eighteen. I would wait another 37 years before writing to a pen-pal in prison

(Go to Part 4)

(This will make more sense by beginning with Part 1.)

At this point in the story, the 40 year clock on writing my novel hadn’t even started ticking. I wasn’t even a writer. When Caryl Chessman made the cover of TIME, I’d probably only been a serious reader for about two years. However, I was devouring biographies, TIME magazine, and grown-up fiction in The Saturday Evening Post.

In a sixth grade class production, I experienced that magical moment of seeing my name in print over something I’d written. It hooked me. I was a writer. My father offered me a deal: If I would teach myself to type over the summer vacation, he would let me take creative writing as my elective in 7th Grade. From that class, I gained my chilhood best friend/critique partner. In 8th grade, I held a check in my hands, eight dollars for a short story sold to Three/Four, a Methodist Sunday School handout. Writing for the junior high newspaper, I finagled an interview with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then a candidate for President. By twenty, I would certainly have a Pulitzer, by twenty-five, perhaps my Nobel.

Somehow, though, in place of the Pulitzer, I had to settle for second place in the short story contest of a national teen magazine.

Then, about 1966 or 1967, I read the books by Caryl Chessman, all three of them.

Today’s milestone: David Anthony Durham, chairman of my thesis committee, emailed to say he had received the first 212 pages of my novel, and will begin working on it. David was new this semester to the CSU Fresno faculty, so I wasn’t able to take any of my coursework with him, but I am excited about working with him one-on-one. His new novel, Acacia, his first effort in fantasy, has won numerous year-end-recognitions. As time allows, I’ve been enjoying his previous book, Pride of Carthage, about Hannibal.

Go to Part 3.

The History of Friday 10:03 (Part 1)

How does it take 40 years to write a novel?

Recently, I saw another author’s ten-year saga of getting her book published. I haven’t even begun the publishing part yet. For the writing task, though, I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m working toward a deadline in mid February for giving it to my thesis committee, and one in mid March to show it around at a writers’ conference. Over the years, many people have asked what it was about, or if I was getting finished, or any number of polite questions when the real question concerned whether there really was a novel in all that talk. There’s a story in that, and at a little bit each day, it might take almost until mid March to tell the story. I will begin it here.

First though, I must point out that Friday, 10:03 is a working title. Much as I like it, I will probably have to come up with something else in order to sell the book. Publishers have rules against numbers in titles, and Friday, 10:03 presents some additional problems. How should you read the time? Three minutes past ten? I have always said it, “Ten-o-three.” The colon presents its own problems—no file name will accept it. The comma in a blog label would be read as dividing it into two labels. So the title will have to change, but I don’t have a replacement for it yet. For the moment, this work-in-progress is still titled, Friday, 10:03.

Next, I must distinguish between when I first put words on paper with the characters and story that has evolved into Friday, 10:03, and the earlier time when the jumbled thoughts and questions first began to bubble inside my brain. The writing must have started in late 1970 or early 1971. I know that on our first date, I showed an rough sketch to the woman who eventually became my wife. That would have been Easter, 1970.

However, the percolation had begun a full ten years earlier. By May 2, 1960, when the State of California executed Caryl Chessman, he’d been on San Quentin’s Death Row for twelve years. He'd he’d written three books, made the cover of TIME magazine, and become such a cause-célèbre that the State Department asked California to postpone the execution so that Eisenhower could tour South America without being mobbed.

I was ten. I read the TIME magazine cover story. Then, for another ten years, I mulled.

Go to Part 2.