Norman Green

HEAD TRAUMA

Junior Seau, dead by his own hand at the age of forty-three.

They say that for every complex, difficult problem there is a simple, easy to understand wrong answer. It is tempting to blame Seau’s death on football, equally as tempting to say that something else must have driven him over the edge, but I am willing to bet that his life in the NFL had a lot to do with his suicide.

Football is a great game. I love football. A lot of Americans do. Violence is huge in this country, and it ain’t just football, either, we’ve got hockey, we’ve got mixed martial arts, we’ve got boxing, we’ve got all of those make-believe cowboys in the NRA… And it’s odd, don’t you think, that we get all irate about cockfighting and dogfighting but we have no problem with two human beings getting into a ring and savaging one another until one of them loses consciousness. And don’t tell me about referees, rules, or ring doctors, I don’t want to hear it. That stuff is all for show. I will carry forever in my memory the image of Larry Holmes at the end of his fight with Ali, a man whom he held in some regard, Ali slumping defenseless in a corner, Holmes gesturing angrily at the referee to stop the fight.

The referee standing there as dumb as a statue.

Holmes turning back to his grisly work.

I can hear it now: ‘They knew what they were getting into…’

Bullshit.

If you had told me, at any point during my teens or early twenties, that I could play in the NFL if I were just willing to give up whatever life I may have had after the age of fifty, I would have signed up in a heartbeat.

In all probability, you would have, too.

No one understands fifty when they’re that young, fifty isn’t real, it’s mythical. Fifty? Come on. What is there to do when you’re that old? You might just as well go ahead and kill yourself… But from my current vantage point, where fifty is quickly receding in the rear-view mirror, I can promise you that life after fifty can be just as sweet as it ever was.  Maybe more. And at least partially due to his participation in a game played for our amusement, Junior Seau will never experience that.

You okay with it?

What do you suppose the average life expectancy is for former NFL players? Go ahead, Google it. You won’t get a definitive answer, I’ve seen all sorts of numbers, from fifty-four to sixty-something. The NFL knows the answer, though, you can bet your house on that. You can be just as sure that they will never tell you what the real number is. The NFL will now, no doubt, go to great lengths to create the impression that they’re making their game safer. They’ll change rules, they’ll fine players, they’ll fund studies and hire platoons of doctors…

They won’t change the helmets, they like the crunching noises too much.

I don’t mean to go off on the NFL, not really. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s ours, yours and mine.

We love this shit.

OUT!!

I feel like I finally managed to get my 35 year old son to move the hell out of my basement.

For the record, I don’t have a 35 year old son. I did, however, finish the changes to my last writing project, ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ Sometimes it seems to me that the editing process lasts for about an ice age. And there’s no guarantee that I’m done with it even now, because some editors like to, ah, you know, what would be a good way to put it? Help you take your manuscript the last 5% of the way there? So, who knows, I may get it back yet.

If I really, really, really wanted to make Benbow Street as good as I possibly can, what I should do is put it on a shelf for about a year, because whenever I read something that I’ve written but not looked at for a long time, the edits jump off the page at me. How come I couldn’t see them when I was writing the thing? With me, there are, I believe, two things going on. One, at the end of any writing project I think I lose perspective. Working on something for so long, I get to the point where I can’t see it all that well any more. I can still see how a sentence works, sure, but larger questions are more problematic. And the other thing is that I am, obviously, free to make any changes I want, pretty much at any time, but once the thing is in print, I can’t help but think about changes I should have made.

You always want what you can’t have.

So anyway, I’m done with ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ More or less. Sort of done. My agent has it now, and what happens from here is basically out of my hands. I mean, I suppose there are things that I can do in terms of publicity when the time comes, but that’s a topic for another day. What I need to do right now is let go, have a little faith. As a matter of fact, what I really need to do is to get going on something else. As I recall, I had something else cooking before this latest round of editing, I had my opening down and I was feeling pretty good about the story.

Whatever it was.

But it’s been a while, and that confidence I once had is largely dissipated, and I need to go back and re-read, and re-think those early pages. That, I suspect, is not an entirely bad thing.

But it is appalling, really, how often the answer to whatever I happen to be going through turns out to be something like, ‘Get back to work.’

HALF FULL?

Optimists, they say, live longer than pessimists. That may or may not be true, but I think it would be safe to argue that optimists probably enjoy their time here more than pessimists do. I am generally an optimist, I usually assume that things will work out, that I will be okay, that you probably will too, and that in the end, it will all, somehow, make some kind of sense. Writing is an act of optimism, you do it in the (insert your adjective of choice here) belief that you have something interesting to say and that you can say it in a manner compelling enough to convince someone else to want to read it. Writing is an act of faith, both in yourself and in your fellow human beings.

Optimism is not always easy to maintain. People in the Middle East are still blowing one another up with disturbing frequency. Greeks and Frenchmen riot in the face of inhuman practices such as going to work and paying your taxes. A child is discovered beaten and starved to death and the mother’s defense seems to be ‘Nobody told me what I was supposed to do.’ Another airliner goes down, this time with 167 people on board. India and Pakistan continue to fight with one another over an uninhabitable and strategically insignificant patch of the Himalayas in a conflict that has been likened to ‘two bald men fighting over a comb.’ And here in the US, we are treated once again to the spectacle of yet another presidential election, which reminds me of that great American philosopher P.T. Barnum, who once observed, ‘nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’ Although, now that I think of it, Barnum did just that.

All that just in today’s newspaper.

Humbug.

I suppose you could say that this stuff goes on all the time, that it is my perceptions that are out of whack, and you might be right. Maybe I’m a mechanic depressive. (That is a term coined by Ernest Hemingway, he used it in ‘Islands in the Stream,’ which was the book he was supposed to be working on when he blew his brains out instead.) But even if I’m stuck in a ‘life sucks and then you die’ frame of mind, it’s no excuse for not working. The term ‘work’ carries a lot of seriously lousy baggage, I’ll give you that, but it has been my experience that work will get you through the bad shit in your life better than just about anything else can. And while writing is work, it isn’t hard work. Let’s be real, any writer who tries to sell you that tired bullshit about opening a vein and bleeding on the page is either delusional, lying to you or has never held a real job in his or her life.

I am supposed to be working on ‘Benbow Street Shakedown,’ which is my latest effort. And I’m thiiiiis close… Really, I am. One rainy Saturday ought to be enough to finish it off. Oh, and today’s Friday and it’s supposed to rain all frickin’ weekend. The funny thing is that I know I’ll feel better when I’m done with this, when my agent has it and it’s on its way to becoming an actual book. I’m even pretty happy with the (almost) finished product, I think there’s some good stuff in it and it might even find an audience.

How’s that for optimism?

I just can’t finish it.

That’s it, I’m out of excuses, this weekend I’m gonna wrap this baby up. I promise.

RECON… OR NOT

My agent returned the manuscript of ‘Benbow Street Shakedown’ to me, along with some notes on suggested changes. I haven’t thought much about that story lately, instead I’ve been wrestling with the opening of another project while at the same time kicking around some ideas about a third. To me, this is a little bit like fooling around on your girlfriend, however much fun it might seem like at the time it is generally a bad idea and probably more trouble that it’s worth. In any event, when I got the email from my agent it occurred to me that one of the scenes I wrote for ‘Benbow Street’ could not happen the way I told it. The scene is question is set on the Williamsburg Bridge, which is a rather peculiar structure that shares very little of the grace of her sisters up and down the river. I decided, instead of leaning on Google, Wikipedia, et al, to go and have a look at the bridge in person. Five-thirty Sunday morning, I had the roads mostly to myself, and in my little Nissan Z, it turned out to be a sweet ride.

I was right about the bridge, but I don’t think it will matter much. I might change up a sentence or two but I’m not going to go crazy. A good copy editor will probably notice the inaccuracies but I doubt if anyone else will care. The thing that struck me, though, was how different everything looked from how I remembered it. They renamed and reconfigured the Tri-Boro, sobered her up and gave her a bath, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which had been under construction since Adam and Eve invented underwear, is finally finished, smooth, clean and scarcely recognizable. Even the Willy B  got a new roadbed, though underneath it all she is still as ugly as ever.

On my way home I got to see a beautiful fiery sunrise, but it occurred to me that the City of New York that I write about is not the one that you can go and visit. I write mostly about the city that I remember, or the one I think I remember, some fleeting reality filtered through my perceptions, images corroded by time. Of all the elements that go together to make up the story of ‘Benbow Street Shakedown,’ it is the characters, who are not misremembered but invented whole cloth, that feel the most rooted in reality. At least, to me. If you ever read the story it is my hope that they feel that way to you, too, that when you meet 13 year-old Cheo Hernandez, you will feel like you’ve probably seen him somewhere, smacking his fist into his baseball glove and waiting for his chance to make a play.

SOUTHBOUND

No progress to report on my newest writing project, or on any of the other ones, either, because work was interrupted by a trip down south. Previously, I have always felt like a foreigner on my infrequent trips south of the Mason-Dixon line, but things change, or maybe I’m the one changing, because things didn’t seem quite as strange this time.

One thing I noticed: food is a lot more important down south than it is up here in Yankee territory. Even the fast food joints are generally a cut above, and sometimes they transcend the category altogether. Stopped for a quick breakfast in a Hardee’s somewhere in Alabama, just your basic bacon egg and cheese bisquit… The place was staffed by some moderately overweight ladies who smiled a lot while they waited on us, and breakfast tasted far better than anything that costs you three bucks ought to taste: eggs like the chicken just popped them out, bacon from the hand of a master, and the bisquit! I mean, I could feel my arteries clogging, but the bisquit was a downright spiritual experience.

The rest of the trip was a little tougher.

My father, at the age of 91, finished dying. Not so bad, I guess, not in and of itself, he had a long run and he lived life on his own terms, right to the end. The real tragedy, to me, is that he started dying a long time ago.

Age is relentless, I get that. Youth has its gifts, but they fade, and in trying too hard to hang on to them you only succeed in looking stupid. The things that age gives you might not be valued all that much in today’s society but that does not make them any less real. The trick, I think, lies in acceptance. All this talk about 50 being the new 30 is bullshit, 50 is fucking 50, man, it’s a lot of years, a lot of miles, a bunch of scars and a few things hurting that didn’t hurt when you were 30. Or rather, when I was 30.

That isn’t the hard part.

Like it or not, we are herd animals. Social beings, if you prefer. We are designed to affiliate with our fellows, and to contribute. When I was 30, I contributed with my energy and my sweat. I still do some of that, but much less than I used to. The thing is, I still need to make my contributions, but now I need to find other ways to do it. I know some things now that I didn’t know then, I can do some things now that I couldn’t, then. I have more to contribute now, but it’s no longer as simple as rousting my fat ass out of bed and going to work.

And here’s a fact for you: the day you begin listening to your own opinion and no one else’s, the day you cut yourself off from the rest of us, the day you decide to hide your light under a basket, that’s the day you begin to die.

Peace, Freddy.

PAGE ONE, AGAIN

Still waiting on my agent. He is, I am told, reading the latest draft of my YA novel, titled, at the moment, ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ When he’s done, he will either begin looking for a publisher or kick it back to me for more changes. Even if he does send it back, I can’t imagine that anything he wants done will amount to a lot of work. So, hopefully, the finish line approaches.

This editing process has taken a couple of months. What that really means is that, for at least that long, I haven’t written anything new, not first draft, right out of the box new. That ceased to be true a couple of days ago. But it was an odd sensation, not having anything brewing, it felt like when you  have to drop out of something you like, particularly if you’ve been at it long enough to attain a certain level of proficiency. I tweaked my back a while ago and I had to lay off the gym. No big deal, I remember thinking, I’ll be back at it soon enough, but in the meantime I could feel myself getting fatter and slower and I really missed my workouts.

Use it or lose it.

I’d had a few ideas rattling around but none of them seemed to fit with any of the others, it seemed to me that I could have made a beginning out of any of them but I just wasn’t feeling it. Then, a few days ago, I caught myself spending more and more time thinking about what I should do next. I don’t mean thinking in any linear, logical way, but just seeing the shapes of the characters, hearing their voices, looking for the shapes of the places where they live.

Most writers read a lot, myself included. I like the New York Daily News, The News covers NYC with a bit of an attitude, and it doesn’t edit out the details, the way The Times does, to spare your gentle sensibilities. Once in a while I will come across a picture or a story that grabs me in some way, and I like to cut those out and stick them in a file folder. If they trigger a strong emotional response, there must be something there, no? Take the story of Tyler Clementi, for example. On the day it broke they ran his picture, the one I’m sure everyone has seen by now, together with all you really needed to know about the events leading up to his suicide. I would not presume to write about Tyler but his story is just about as tragic as anything I have read, anywhere. I could almost talk myself into believing in an afterlife just so I could hope that he is in a better place.

In any event, in the same folder with Tyler’s story is another clipping, this one of a five year old kid who had been getting a bad time from the NYC Dept of Education. From his picture it appears that they kicked him around but they did not break him, in the paper he looks resolute, resigned to his fate, ready for another day in hell. I stuck his picture up on my bulletin board and after a while all those story ideas came together in one frame and now I have it, I have my beginning, I have the all-important opening pages, I have the setting, I have at least some of the main characters, and I even have a working title.

‘Great White.’

So here I am, page eleven, not bad for two days, so I feel like I’m on the path. I hereby resolve not to listen to the negative aspects of my diseased personality or to spend too long looking up at the size of the hill I have just begun to climb.

PLAY YOUR OWN GAME

Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks hot new superstar point guard, said that last year, on those infrequent occasions when he got into a game, he concentrated on fitting in. He decided that if he got a shot this year he was going to succeed or fail on the basis of playing his own game. So he finally got his shot, and the rest is history.

Go Jeremy!

What I take from that is that you have to write what you want to write, not what your mother (or anybody else) wants you to write. I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to advice, as a matter of fact I do that myself. I told a good friend of mind from Brooklyn that I was in between writing projects and didn’t have much of a clue what I should do next. ‘Get back to the street,’ he told me. ‘Get back to Bushwick.’ I value his opinions, and not just on writing, either, so I listen. But still, it’s a temptation to try and figure out what would stand a better chance of finding a broader audience. Unless you hit one out of the park on your first time up at bat, I do think it’s human nature to wonder what sort of manuscript would bring you more readers than the last one. I’m not sure there’s ever a good answer to a question like that, though. It will take me a year, more or less, to write my next novel and just because a particular topic is hot right now does not mean anyone will still be interested in it a year or two from now.

Besides, I don’t think I do vampires very well.

Not the fictional kind, anyhow. No capes or long white fangs for me, thanks. There is no shortage of genuine predators, though. And why do they need to be supernatural, I ask you? Check out ‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,’ one of Stephen King’s better efforts. This girl gets lost in the woods and winds up being stalked by a giant bear. You can’t tell me that you can scare the poop out of yourself any more thoroughly with a Satanic bear over a real one. The real one wants to kill you and eat you, isn’t that bad enough? And why do we have to invent werewolves and vampires, aliens and chupacabra, give me a break. There’s enough real stuff to be afraid of.

I think I do inner city predators pretty well, so maybe my buddy from Brooklyn has a point.

Yeah, I can do that. I think I will try to follow Lin’s example and win or lose playing my own game, not someone else’s.

On the topic of invented horrors, I must admit that I am intrigued by one of J.K.Rowling’s throwaway characters, Teddy Lupin. He only got a paragraph or two right at the very end of it all, but if you read the books you know what I’m talking about. Now there’s a guy who’s got an inner demon and a half, and he can’t win because it’s not some parasite trying to influence him in the wrong direction, it’s part of who he really is. It’s him…

I hope Rowling does something with the guy…

EMPTY PAGES

This business of confronting the empty page is an interesting problem. I have certainly had my troubles with writer’s block before. My longest dry spell was my first encounter with the phenomenon. I was halfway through the first draft of my first book, ‘Shooting Dr. Jack,’ and I ran dry. Suddenly I had nothing much to say. Days turned into weeks until an entire year had gone by and it was beginning to look like writing was just another one of those manic enthusiasms that grip me from time to time, and maybe it had run its course and departed. What got me out of that first one was an audiobook, ‘If You Want to Write,’ by Brenda Ueland. My wife got it for me, told me she wanted me to listen to it during my daily commute to and from work. Well, it worked, Brenda got me going, and I’ll always be grateful. Since that first time I have run into the problem again from time to time, but when it happens now I don’t get too squirrelly about it. For me, trying harder just makes things worse, but what works is imagination. I lie on my couch, close my eyes and just let my imagination roll. Actually I think it probably does that most of the time anyway, what I’m really doing is taking the time and trouble to pay attention. It seems to work for me. If you, like me, suffer from the affliction of a Puritan upbringing (what are you DOING!), it may take a little getting used to, but I know if I spend a couple afternoons on the couch I will come away with a starting point, and that is usually enough.

I am on a bit of a break from writing right now. It has been about a month. For a while I kidded myself that I was editing, but what I was really doing was admiring my own stuff, and that gets old in a hurry. The book in question is, at the moment, called ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ My agent has it, and I am trying not to think about what may or may not be going on there.

Also, it seems that late winter, early spring is a tough time for me to do any real writing, things get busy at my day job and I’m still trying to squeeze another ski trip in before it’s too late, although this year I might have to go a long way north to find any snow. Still, I think it’s time for me to start thinking about getting back on the horse. I think I’ll do it, block out a couple of afternoons, turn off my phones, and listen…

GO GIANTS

So they did it, the NY Giants won the superbowl. It was a great ride and great fun to watch (aside from my nagging unease about Harry Carson’s cognitive difficulties. There are a lot of other guys whose names you could put next to Harry’s, including Dave Duerson, who, being dead, doesn’t have to worry any longer about the damage his brain suffered in the NFL). Still, it makes for an inspiring story. The Giants were a mess at midseason but they pulled it together, managed to harness their considerable talents, played hard, and they got lucky as hell. I don’t care how rabid a Giants fan you are, you have to admit that if the ball had bounced the other way once or twice during their sprint to the finish line, that trophy would have someone else’s name on it.

So there they are, the three things you’ve got to have if you’re going to make it to the big dance.

One, you’ve gotta have the talent. There are plenty of people who want to be novelists, they put in the time, they do the work, they try like hell, but if you’ve read their stuff you know they ain’t making it. If you’re a writer you’ve probably had the experience, someone asks you to read his stuff and when you do, the hardest thing is facing the guy afterwards, trying to find a humane way to deliver the bad news.

Two, you’ve gotta do the work. I know people who have the chops but not the ambition, and I bet you do, too. And writing a novel, now matter how enjoyable parts of the process might be, is work. What makes it even harder is that most of us have a whole world of other things clamoring for our attention, jobs and careers and houses and relationships and lawns to mow and all the rest of it, so we have to grab our writing time when we can get it. How seductive is that armchair in front of the TV at the end of your day? Yeah, sure, go ahead, commute into the city, bust it all day long, fight your way through the traffic to get home again, deal with everything else on your plate, and then pretend you don’t see the TV or the X-Box or the internet or your TBR pile. I’ve got Elmore Leonard’s ‘Pagan Babies’ sitting there looking at me, along with stuff from Deaver, Pelicanos, Mosley… Screw it, I deserve a night off.

Yeah, sure. Yield, and your novel remains unwritten.

Three, and last of all, you have to be lucky. I would like to believe that the cream eventually rises to the top, but I really think that you can have all the talent in the world and you can work your butt off but if the ball doesn’t bounce your way, you’re screwed. It’s part of the process: if the Goonas aren’t smiling on you, you ain’t getting to the promised land.

Don’t believe me? Ask Moses.

One thing, though, is beyond dispute: if you don’t do the work, your name ain’t even in the hat, so shut off that television, stop looking at the web, and get back to work.

GOING NAKED

We all have our secrets.

We have all done stupid things, here and there, now and then, but most of us do so from the comfort of obscurity and even if we have been so unfortunate as to make the local newspaper, the public’s eye usually loses interest quickly and moves on. We are generally free to present to public view only those aspects of ourselves that we want people to see. We fabricate, in other words, a public persona, and we keep our inner selves quiet and safely out of view.

Artists are not so fortunate.

Take a look at Van Gogh’s ‘Avenue of Poplars.’ Even after all his long years in the grave, this one work tells you two things about the man he was: one, that he was ferociously talented, and two, that he was cut off from his fellows, and desperately lonely. Or Michelangelo: he was a brilliant sculptor and painter, and he adored the naked male form. Come on, how many naked women did he carve?

Not judging, just saying.

Writers are no different.

Take Shakespeare, the greatest of us all. He hid himself more successfully than most but still, you can see in his works his taste for strong women, his admiration of those around him whose mental processes were more reflective and less intuitive, not to mention his distaste for the leaders of his day, the upper classes that he portrayed in all their venality and greed. I find it ironic that the authorship of his work is questioned so persistently, based on nothing much more than the upper class prejudice against the ‘common’ man. No, of course it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t even have a moat! It had to have been a Lord, or an Earl at the very least.

Please.

The art reveals the man.

Take poor old Emily Dickinson, who did not lack the courage to confront her own spirituality and her own mortality but who found it impossible to step out into our wide world.  And Hemingway. Dickens, Mailer and his pal Gore, John D. MacDonald. Yeah, sure, it’s all fiction, but…

I seeee you…

So you’re a writer! And you know that you do your best work when you let your hair down, when you set your imagined characters free to rage across the page, to love and hate, to be fallibly human, to pursue their desires, to seek revenge. Don’t be afraid, nothing kills good work more swiftly or reliably than fear, don’t worry that you’re showing us, your readers, more of yourself than you might ultimately find comfortable. You can always clean that up, right? In your next draft?

Good luck with that.

And me?

Hey, you’ll have to read the book.