Restoration
I re-wrote and posted five short stories in the last couple of weeks with the intention towards publication. I excavated these zombies from the tombs of my files with the urge to see if they still had life after 15-20 years. They did. And as I read and re-wrote them, I couldn't help notice a pattern of perspective. (Yes, that alliteration was intended to make you nod and understand the deep seriousness I felt.) The perspective was as a younger man. And it was a strange, out-of-body experience, because I knew I wrote these, but I didn't recognize the voice.
Until I began re-reading and editing the stories and then they reverberated my memory, shaking long-forgotten details from my mind like dusting sand from inside a hat. And I recalled how I germinated my experiences into three of these stories. And how they grew from this sprout of humor, this tiny growth of nostalgia and pain, this weed of weirdness I'd crossed somewhere in my life as a man in his thirties and forties. I saw myself in the stories, but I also recognized how I camaflouged my identity, my mark on them, using humor and by adding characters and actions that didn't really happen but added to the point of the story.
Dead Weight and A Good Line were stories arising from my passion for surprise. Neither story is autobiographical or bears any resemblance to my own life. The other three stories do, however:
Lovin' in Satisac Springs I wrote in the early 1990s after I watched my dog Tramp interact with the three dogs next door. Tramp wanted so bad to get to the other side of the fence and love on those three, but he was always left out. While the three living together mainly ignored each other. The owner of the dogs tried unsuccessfully to mate the big white dog with a Russian something-or-other bitch. But the bitch was a...well, a bitch. And she was more interested in the Rottweiler. While Tramp was interested in all three of them, because he couldn't get to them.
I didn't know where I was going with the story when I started writing it, but I remember distinctly that I wanted to make a point about having and not having. Not just for things, but for love and affection. Mainly because I've always noticed that I crave what I don't have and ignore everything I do have.
Clay Pigeons was very autobiographical. Except the ending, of course. Or I'd be writing this from a small room at the California Men's Colony. When I was 15, I worked in a trap house for a guy with one jaw in San Franciscquito Canyon in the Newhall area of L.A. County. And, yes, he only paid me one-fifth cent for each clay pigeon. I'd work all Saturday and make four or five bucks for getting pelted with buckshot in the back of the head and having my hand whacked by the trap arm, mostly by impatient women controling the trap trigger. The ending of the story is what I fantacized doing to "One-Jaw," who was the father of a neighbor girl. He was actually a nice old guy, but stingy as hell and not too personable. It was all about money with him. All these elements, I thought, made for a good story, but I felt compelled to insert my passion for surprise and my disdain for stingy people at the end of the story by having One-Jaw lose the rest of his face.
Coasting in '68 was a very personal story. Much of it was true. No, I didn't run over a poodle, and I didn't get beat up by one of my workers (almost did, though), but these elements of the story helped dramatize what was the end result of this period in my life when I was 16. The emotional nostalgia drove me to re-write this story nearly 20 years after I first wrote it. My father and mother never reconciled their marriage, but they did restore their relationship, even while re-marrying many years ago. I live across the street from my father. He is an integral part and the most important man in my life. Not only that, my father, mother and their respective spouses are great friends. For the last 25 years, we all meet at each other's homes and celebrate birthdays, Christmas and Thanksgiving as an extended family.
In the story, it made sense to me that Matt restores his respect for his teacher by publicly apologizing to him for calling him a fat walrus. It made sense for Matt to restore the love the two little girls had for their poodle, after he tore it to pieces with the undercarriage of his mother's Mustang, by replacing it with a puppy. It all made sense, because back in 1968, the pain of my father leaving us was devastating. But, in re-writing this story, I experienced a new revelation about how things destroyed are re-built, transformed and, as in my family, restored to something greater.
Onward.
Posted by Tom Eubanks at 3/24/2010 4:27 PM 
Categories: On Writing
Tags: Getting Personal Storytelling Essay
Categories: On Writing
Tags: Getting Personal Storytelling Essay
Thank you for sharing these revelations behind the fabulous stories you've posted on this blog. And, especially, thank you for the courage to share some of your personal life with your readers. These stories all seem worthy of publication to me. I hope you are giving it another go.
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Thanks, Marri. I'm not getting any comments back, but my blog statistics show a few people have been reading the stories. So I appreciate feedback.
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