Norman Green

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP….

You ever notice, the malapropisms written for Yogi Berra in the AFLAC commercial are not as funny as the ones he comes up with by himself?  I think it is impossible to compete with what arises spontaneously out of Berra’s unique mental wiring harness.  Theirs are slightly forced, his are slightly magical.  ‘It gets late early out there’ makes a certain cracked sort of sense if you know that the corner of Yankee stadium he was talking about got dark sooner than the rest of the field.  Who could think that up on their own?  Certainly not me.  I am better off simply paying attention to the everyday madness that seems to flow all around me.

 

An old junkie standing on a Brooklyn street corner, almost nodded out, Fire Department ambulance stops by to pick up a customer.  The junkie comes out of it, toddles over, asks the fireman, ‘Where you taking him?’  ‘Wood-Hull,’ says the fireman.  Junkie goes over, leans down so his face is about an inch from the dude on the gurney.  ‘You are gonna diiiiiiiiie,’ he says emphatically.  From that I found out that A: firemen do have a sense of humor, and B, Wood-Hull Hospital has a horrible reputation.  I talked to a few nurses, got some more particulars.  I used what I learned as part of the story in my first book, Shooting Dr. Jack, and I think it added another drop or two of Brooklyn flava.

 

I do wish, sometimes, that writing was something I could do cooped up all alone in my basement office, but only a part of the process happens there.  A lot of it, and maybe the most important part, happens out in the world.  No doubt there are writers who can lock themselves away somewhere and spin their imaginary worlds completely out of what’s up in their heads, but I ain’t one of those.  I can’t tell you how many times I have bemoaned my fate, wishing I did not have to journey into some of the inner city neighborhoods where I have worked, but without those experiences I never would have met the guy who had a cat who thought its name was ‘Getthefuckoutahere,’ or witnessed the courage and determination of the woman with the frozen hip who walked to work every day, summer, winter, rain, snow, whatever.  I never would have seen the terrible price crack cocaine extracts from its users, or seen addicts fight their way back to life, seemingly all the way from death’s doorstep.  The list is not endless, but it is a very long list, and I suppose what it amounts to is raw material.  I could never imagine characters as vital or as interesting as the ones I continue to meet, nearly every day.

 

One of my goals as a writer used to be to do well enough to be able to quit my day job and just write.  I have been able to do that a time or two, and I would say that the results have been decidedly mixed.  I wonder, if I ever have the opportunity again, if I would make the same choice.  From my current vantage point, I think probably not.  Of course, everyone is different, and if my job kept me locked up in an office somewhere I would probably write mostly about a guy who wanted to hang himself, but I have the extreme good fortune to bump up against a lot of ordinary New Yorkers just about every day.  You can say what you like about New York, but one thing is beyond dispute, there are people from Arabia to Zimbabwe in this city.  They have all brought with them their native culture and attitude and they all murder the English language in their own unique way.  And a lot of them are funny as hell.  If you are a writer, they all have something to give you.

 

They say unsolicited advice is only worth what you pay for it, and if you take vocational guidance from me you are an idiot, but I will say this: my best stuff comes right off the streets of New York City.

 

I love my job.

SLEEPING POLICEMEN

Years ago I visited some friends in Cali, Colombia.  They lived in a neighborhood that was, for Cali, a quiet, middle-class kind of place.  The main problem with the area was that the thoroughfare that ran through it was a favorite short-cut and a great many of the popular bus lines ran down that street.  (I wish I’d had the foresight to take a picture of the sign on the bus that said ‘Don’t throw your trash on the bus, throw it out the window.’)  Most of the bus drivers went as fast as their ancient steeds would move, and the unfortunate result was that it was sadly common for children to die on that street.

 

Justice is probably a meaningless abstraction to a parent who has lost a child, and the parents in Cali were generally not afforded even that dubious comfort.  Long story short, one Sunday the neighborhood fathers got together after the busses had stopped running for the night and they build a couple of ‘sleeping policemen’ right across the width of the road.  A sleeping policeman is one of those bumps that forces you to slow down so that you don’t destroy your car.  Monday morning, the first bus roared down that street, hit the first bump and went airborne.  By ten that same morning, all the bus lines had changed their routes.

 

All of them.

 

Sleeping policemen are amazingly effective, they jerk you awake, they snap you out of the hypnotic state you sometimes fall into when you are driving on roads so familiar that you can do it on autopilot.

 

They break the spell.

 

How many sleeping policemen have you written into your story? 

 

Think about it: you have carefully crafted that all-important opening sentence, you have grabbed your reader’s attention, you have woven your spell, drawn him in, submerged him into your fictional world, and then…

 

Boink!

 

‘Hey!  That’s not how you spell ‘nymphomaniac!’

 

Yes, I know, the copy editor will catch it, but yes, it still matters, because agents and editors do not like sleeping policemen any more than the rest of us.  And it doesn’t have to be something as simple as a misspelled word, either.  I once had a character ride a bus into the bowels of New York City’s Grand Central Station, which would have been a neat trick, considering it’s a TRAIN station.

 

Boink!

 

Oh, you say, come on, how many readers are gonna catch that?  Not all of them, certainly, but enough, and what if one of the ones who does happens to be a reviewer?

 

You can build sleeping policemen into dialog.  Have you noticed, if you’re a writer I’m sure you have, how few people speak high school teacher English?  Apart from high school English teachers, that is.  But how often have you read dialog that a writer put in a character’s mouth which that character would never say?  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ says Shady Sal, from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, ‘but this is a robbery.  Raise your hands up over your head and remain calm and no one will be harmed.’

 

Boink!

 

You know what Sal would really say, he’d say something like ‘Stick ‘em up, lady, and keep your trap shut or I’ll drill ya.’  The problem is, if you have spent years sitting in English classes being indoctrinated by the teachers instead of more productively staring out the window like students such as myself, writing dialog as though it were to be spoken by Dudley Do-Right can be a hard habit to break.  And indulge me, please, in a minor pet peeve: if your character is in a situation where you know he would lose his temper and shout ‘fuck!’, have a little courage.  Do not, please, have him say ‘what the..’ or something similar instead.  Your mother will forgive you.

 

Or suppose your story deals with something weighty or controversial.  Your characters are going to confront one another’s attitudes about evils such as sexism or war or the Internal Revenue Service.  ‘You know, Sheila,’ your protagonist says, ‘discrimination is harmful.  It doesn’t simply hurt the person being discriminated against, it’s also destructive to the rest of society…’ 

 

Boink! 

 

This taking the easy way out, it’s a cheap trick for which your mother will forgive you but your readers will not.  If you want to deal with, say, racism, don’t cop out by having someone give a speech with the capital ‘R’ in it.  Construct a real situation where a real character suffers real damage.  I know it’s a lot more work, but nobody said this was gonna be easy.

 

As a fiction writer, you need to be a spell-binder.  You work hard to build your imaginary universe and lure us all inside, and it is a testament to your skill that you’ve got us turning the pages.  Just remember, every time you write a sleeping policeman into the story, you break the spell, and some of your readers close your book and put it down.

READING

Reading was my first escape.

 

From the time I was very small, even before first grade (no kindergarten for this kid), I was fascinated by anything in print.  My old man used to bitch, ‘send him for a tool, if an old newspaper blows across his path, he’s lost.’  Zane Grey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Roberts, John D. MacDonald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Time-Life books, the Harvard Classics (I can’t believe I plowed through that stuff), it didn’t much matter.  Looking back on it now, I think maybe reading saved me, because when I was a kid in the sixties, there were compulsions that were worse, by far.

 

The addiction comes and goes these days.  When I discovered Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series they were all written but for one or two, and I submerged myself into that world until I had run through them all.  My God, O’Brian could show you a character with all of his cracks and shiny places…  And not just a character but an entire world brought to life with such color and force that it made you want to kiss the ground when you finally came up for air and found that you were living here after all, not there, and you had access to a modicum of health care and a facsimile of justice.  I had a similar experience reading Harry Potter: I saw the first movie on network television, by that time all of the books were written except for the last one.  I was firmly hooked after the opening fifteen minutes of that movie and I couldn’t stop reading until I had finished them all.  The only book I actually had to wait for was The Deathly Hallows, and to all of you who were on that train from the beginning, I don’t know how you did it, the wait for that book drove me nuts.

 

I remember having the same sensation as a kid.  Every year John D. MacDonald published another volume of his Travis McGee series, and every year I had to make the same decision: do I wait, can I wait for the paperback or do I spring for the hardcover?  It was not a question of saving my allowance, there was no such thing where I came from, I worked from the age of twelve.  Not only that, but I had other expenses, which we don’t need to go into here.  But the question remained, could I hold out?  And more often the question became, what would I sacrifice to get what I needed?

 

For a while I was into Robert Parker’s Spenser series, I guess I contributed to at least one of Parker’s Mercedes payments, but I don’t know what happened to Spenser.  He got fat, maybe, or he lost his moral compass, as often happens when one reaches middle age and achieves a measure of material success.  And then there’s Tony Hillerman, who gave us Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.  I was blown away by the power of the sense of place that Hillerman gave to Chee, and I continue to envy that fictional character his knowledge of who and what he is and where he belongs.  Sadly, Hillerman got old and his eyesight dimmed.  Maybe he could no longer see his tribal policemen and their world so clearly.  I mourned his passing long before he actually died.

 

What it comes down to, I guess, is contact.  Intimacy.  ‘One man sharpens the face of another,’ so said Solomon, and he was right.  I learned something, I think, from just about everything I read, whether it was Travis McGee battling crooked real estate developers or Ben Franklin struggling with the circumstances of his life (not all the Harvard Classics suck).  To be sure, most of what I read was fiction, and the good guys tend to win a bit more often in fiction, but isn’t that the kind of world we want?

 

In my own work I tend to write mostly about people from humble beginnings, people under pressure of one sort or another, characters who have been forced by time or chance to look hard at what they have become and to decide if that is something they can live with.  I am fascinated by characters who, by force of personality or by necessity, lift their sights and aim at something higher.  And while my stories may take you to some of the seedier parts of town, I like to think that I, and my stories, too, are basically optimistic, that we have not yet gotten to the top of the hill, and that with hope, we continue to climb.