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christopherwatsonbooks · 2 years

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Memories of "Gold"

I wrote this piece, inspired by the death of John Stewart, just a week or so after I wrote the Dan Fogelberg piece that’s published immediately below this one. The artists died a month apart – Fogelberg on December 16, 2007 and Stewart on January 19, 2008 – so it’s fair to presume I was already in that sentimental headspace. But while my time as a rock radio DJ is a side note in the Fogelberg piece, the Stewart piece is all about radio, really, about what his death reminded me of: my nascent days as a rock jock, at the time maybe two-and-a-half years into the business, at most.

That sentimentality is in large part why I’m quite fond of this essay. It’s one of the most stream-of-consciousness, easy-to-compose pieces I’ve ever written, so clearly when I wrote it I was missing the time it describes.

I still miss that time, and the kind of radio that cranky old bastards like me made back then. The kind of fiercely passionate, poetic, open-armed radio that was the norm, back in the day.

Don’t get me started. Hope you enjoy the piece.

Chris

It was probably 1980, although it could have been 1979. The album, Bombs Away Dream Babies, was released in 1979, and I was a freshman at East Carolina University in the fall of 1979 and that’s when I first remember hearing it. So it was probably around then.

I could have heard it on any number of radio stations, but I probably heard it first on WQDR in Raleigh, NC, back when it was one of the Southeast’s pioneering album rock FMs, the first station Lee Abrams consulted, the one that put the Superstars album rock format on the national map. ‘QDR in my memory was glorious, staffed by laid-back jocks who sounded stoned and probably were. When I think of it, I invariably envision Q-SKY, the fictional West Coast album rocker from the 1978 radio fairy tale movie FM. ‘QDR might have been nothing like that in reality, but who cares about reality?

I visited WQDR once, before the owners flipped it to country in 1984 while it was still at the top of its game. I don’t remember why or how I got in there, but there I was. Just a couple of years a jock myself then, standing in WQD-F****n’-R.

All I remember is that the lights were low and the hallway walls were carpeted (I think) and hung with gold records – Clapton, Tom Petty, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, The Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan.

I swear you could smell the pot smoke soaked into the shag, or maybe that’s just a wanna-be memory, too. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was cool as hell.

WQDR was the big badass regional rock FM and if you didn’t listen to it, you weren’t shit. If you didn’t have a ‘QDR bumper sticker stuck somewhere – on your car, a college notebook, a guitar case, the side of your stereo receiver – you weren’t shit. And if you heard a song or album on ‘QDR, it was officially OK to buy it. Hell, it was mandatory.

Yes, radio really did use to be that way. Good radio.

And WQDR is where I first heard “Gold,” by John Stewart. Like I said, I could have heard it anywhere. It reached #5 on the Billboard all-genre Hot 100, so damn near everyone played it. But in my heart, I heard it on ‘QDR.

I heard it in the evening, in the sultry Carolina summer, when the dusk was just breaking the day’s heat but not the humidity, and walking from the campus dorm to The Attic nightclub downtown sometimes meant arriving soaked with sweat, stoked for that first beer.

I heard it coming out of open car windows as they idled at the light, frat-boy drivers leaning right to snog their sorority chick add-a-bead squeezes in the brief space before the green.

I heard it on my roommate Shawn’s killer Realistic stereo, the biggest system on our dorm floor, the one on which we listened to Styx and Queen and America and Supertramp and Zeppelin and Carlin and Pryor and Firesign Theatre and Monty Python and Holst and Wagner and even Flatt and Scruggs. And WQDR, whenever we weren’t playing albums.

John Stewart died on January 19th. He was 68 and he’d evidently been ill for a while. I’m no expert on his career so I won’t even try to comment on it here, other than to note that he was a member of American folk greats the Kingston Trio, that he wrote the Monkees hit “Daydream Believer,” and that he spent his later years, his post-“Gold” years, writing hits for other artists, mostly folk and country.

John Stewart was also tight with Fleetwood Mac, Lindsay Buckingham in particular. Stevie Nicks sings the harmony on “Gold,” and it’s said that the song was inspired by Stewart’s friendship with Buckingham. It fits. The song could’ve been a Fleetwood Mac song, easy, with Buckingham singing it instead of Stewart. And it had that Southern California mellow rock feel that you could still find on American album rock radio then, but that was already on its way out.

Joe Jackson, The Police, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Dire Straits, The Ramones, Marshall Crenshaw, XTC, The Fixx, Pretenders, Elvis Costello, The Cars, Peter Gabriel, Squeeze, Gary Numan, the B-52’s. Lots of folks with skinny ties and spiky hair were turning up on album covers and though lots of stations hated it, album rock radio was changing. Just a year or two later and “Gold” might not have been a hit at all, and I might never have had the chance to play it as a young punk jock, just a year into the business, playing the songs that I’d first heard on ‘QDR. Playing the regional bands too: Glass Moon, PKM, The Brains, The Fabulous Knobs, Super Grit Cowboy Band, Mike Cross and others I can’t begin to recall.

I wasn’t nearly as cool or polished as the ‘QDR jocks but hell, I was spinning the tunes, the songs I heard them play. Although the walls of our little radio station most certainly did not smell of pot. You had to go back into the production room for that. Or the air studio, after hours.

So I was sort of fringe cool. And it was enough. I mean, c’mon. I was a rock radio DJ. You get automatic cool points straightaway for that. Or used to, at least. Back when having the right radio station bumper sticker on your car was akin to a political statement.

John Stewart has died. I read the news and pow, there I am, back in time, quick as a sneeze. Cuing up vinyl on the clunky Russco turntable, looking out of the big street-level studio window into the dusk, at couples walking glued to one another, hips riding together in easy synch, hands slipped into one another’s back jeans pockets. Cigarettes on the broadcast console, spliff burning in the ashtray and the big studio monitors going bump-buh-BUMP-buh bump-buh-BUMP-buh with that bass line shuffle as I start the song, turn down the program master on the old Gates board and answer the request line.

All of that, from one song. It’s not exactly tea and biscuits with Marcel Proust, but it’s good. It is very, very good.

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christopherwatsonbooks · 2 years

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It’s Okay to Like Dan Fogelberg

I wrote this piece in early January, 2008, a few weeks after Dan Fogelberg died. It took me that time to process my feelings, to determine what I was feeling in the wake of the unexpected news, and the largely indifferent media response. Like sorting through old photographs in a shoebox: unexamined for so long that you’d forgotten they were there, then the moment you raise and regard one the memories and feelings stab you so deeply, you wonder how you ever could have forgotten. I had to sit with those feelings awhile, allow the water to calm a bit before I could record what it reflected.

I published this on my now long-gone blog The Ninth House and it received dozens of positive comments, more than any other piece I’d posted there. Which of course was very nice – not only because of all those hits of dopamine, but also because of the affirmation that there were so many other souls who felt as I did. I post it here now, fourteen years later, in hopes it may find more.

When I first published this, the song links played clips I created. Now they'll take you to Spotify, which notoriously pays artists fractions of a cent per stream. It would sure be nice if everyone who pays this piece a visit would do right by Dan’s estate and purchase a track or an album from an online retailer.

I hope you enjoy the piece.

Chris

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now. The holidays got in the way, but maybe that was for the best. It gave me time to really think about what I wanted to say.

And here it is.

It is okay to like Dan Fogelberg.

Go ahead. You can say it. Here, watch me:

I like Dan Fogelberg. Some of Dan Fogelberg’s music, I loved. And still do.

Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer on December 16th, 2007. He was 56. His most recent publicity photos show a good-looking guy, clean-shaven and smiling, the kind of guy who makes middle-aged moms blush and their daughters giggle.

Unfortunately, his reputation didn’t weather the years as well as he. For some folks of a certain age, Fogelberg’s name has become the go-to punch line for jokes about 1970s-era granola-munching, Chukka boot-wearing Sensitive Guys. Many critics loathed him. Rolling Stone’s review of 1979’s Phoenix is so contemptuous, you can damn near picture the author spitting on the album cover.

It’s less troublesome to dismiss Dan Fogelberg, as have most eulogists I’ve read, as that 1970s soft-rock singer-songwriter who scored a few hits than it is to set aside that fashionable prejudice and honestly consider his work. Or, more telling, his work’s popularity.

The fact that so many people evidently aren’t willing to do that – and worse, are dismissing Fogelberg as little more than a footnote to 1970s and early 80s pop – is really getting under my skin.

Fogelberg wasn’t a footnote. From his first album release, 1972’s Home Free, through 1981’s double album The Innocent Age, Fogelberg was regarded as an artist on par with the best of his peers. With Joe Walsh, he was one of the first acts signed by Irving Azoff, who soon went on to manage The Eagles, and he was considered for the spot in that band’s lineup that ultimately went to Walsh.

Reading the liner notes of Dan Fogelberg’s essential discography is like reading a who’s-who of mellow 1970s album rock. He attracted the best session players in the business. The Innocent Age features guest vocals from Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, Richie Furay, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Chris Hillman. If you had any of those artists’ works in your collection, you invariably owned at least one Dan Fogelberg album, too. Probably Souvenirs.

I played Souvenirs and other Fogelberg albums on the air as a rock radio DJ. It wasn’t at all unusual back in the day to hear him played alongside The Eagles, Poco, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, CSNY, Jimmy Buffett, Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, Neil Young and dozens more 1970s album rock radio core artists. You wouldn’t hear “Longer,” from Phoenix, but definitely “Part of the Plan,” “As the Raven Flies” and “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler” from Souvenirs, maybe “Crow” from the underrated Captured Angel, definitely “The Power of Gold” from Dan’s Tim Weisberg collaboration Twin Sons of Different Mothers.

I liked to slide The Innocent Age out of its cover right around midnight. I was a college student in the early 80s, paying my way through school as the late-night jock on the town’s sole rock station, a pitiful low-wattage AM that nonetheless had a cult following. By midnight, I knew the hard partiers had already switched to the big regional FM; those who remained with me were studying or stoned, or both. That was my cue to take it way down: Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs,” The Police’s “Walking on the Moon” next, “Hypnotized” from Fleetwood Mac after that, CSN’s “Dark Star” – you get the vibe. When I needed to stay mellow but bring in a little light, I’d inevitably reach for Dan.

The Innocent Age features Fogelberg’s biggest hits: “Same Old Lang Syne,” “Leader of the Band,” “Run for the Roses” and “Hard to Say.” But one of my favorite tracks to play late at night was “Only the Heart May Know,” his tender duet with Emmylou Harris, sweet as a lullaby sent into the night. Not that I never played anything from Phoenix, “Longer” aside. When I did, it was usually my favorite track from that album, the final one, “Along the Road.” Sometimes I made that the final song I played before unplugging my headphones for the night, a final tired smile goodnight wish for my peeps to sleep on.

“Along the Road” may be my favorite Dan Fogelberg song. Definitely top three. Two. It’s pretty high up there.

Of the ten albums Dan Fogelberg recorded and released between 1972 and 1985, two are RIAA-certified gold, three are platinum, four are double platinum and one – his 1982 Greatest Hits compilation -- is triple platinum. That’s more than 15 million units sold, most of them back when they were still called LPs and you had to actually make the trip to a record store to buy one.

Clearly, somebody other than me likes Dan Fogelberg.

Okay, so maybe you don’t. Maybe you agree with the chorus of critics who labeled his lyrics mawkish, overwrought, treacly and clichéd.

Well, yeah. A lot of his lyrics were. I don’t think an objective listener can deny it, no matter how great a fan they may be.

I’ve always thought Dan Fogelberg on balance was a far better melodist than lyricist. His best melodies from those first six albums are gems of craftsmanship, made more impressive by the sheer number of just damned catchy, stick-in-your-brain songs he cranked out. “Part of the Plan” and “Crow” would sound right at home in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s oeuvre, and the hook to “Wishing on the Moon” from Phoenix is every bit as vital as, say, that of The Eagles’ “Already Gone.” Gritty up the lyrics a little, put Glenn Frey on lead with Dan singing the high harmony (Jesus, that voice) and it could be the B-side hit the Eagles never recorded.

But pair those melodies with Dan’s sentimental pen…

I can’t listen to the title track of 1977’s Nether Lands without the word “gushing” coming to mind. Dan’s standing on a mountaintop, beholding all that is below and before him, his heart and soul singing with the joy of the vista and the moment over a bed of woodwinds, strings and French horns, lush as the soundtrack to Sunrise over The Majestic Rockies, in Technicolor.

It’s just so damn over the top. Like Julie Andrews with a flannel shirt and a beard.

But here’s the thing. Not two years before I first heard “Nether Lands,” I’d been a raw-boned 16-year-old lad standing on the Mogollon Rim, southwest of Winslow, Arizona in the foothills of the Rockies. Sleeping under the stars, kneeling to drink from icy-cold Christopher Creek, standing on a pine-framed ridge to behold thousands of square miles of God’s magnificent Earth spread below and before me.

And so when the good Mr. Fogelberg’s high sweet tenor sang over those soaring, shameless orchestral glissandos, my heart sang with him. Because I had been there, and so knew that he had gotten it exactly and absolutely right.

And there it is. The key to Dan Fogelberg’s popularity, and the source of his most frequent criticisms.

Maybe if he’d thrown in some irony, a little cynicism to go with the poignancy. Maybe if he’d invoked whiskey and cigarettes when his woman done left him, rather than cottonwood trees in autumn. Maybe if he’d taken his hand off his heart and grabbed his crotch a bit more. Or at all.

But that wasn’t his thing. It’s clearly not where Dan lived, or what he believed. Not enough to want to write about it, at any rate.

I imagine the Dan Fogelberg who wrote and recorded those wonderful albums as a sweet guy, a gentle soul who recognized the transience of life and so chose to celebrate its moments of sweetness, chose sentiment over cynicism or resentment, even in life’s most heartrending moments. After you were done cursing and getting drunk and assigning blame, Dan’s the guy you’d eventually want sitting across the table from you over coffee or a beer. He’d listen and nod and smile, and you’d know he understood. He’d put it all into perspective for you. He wouldn’t try to make you feel better, but you’d come away knowing you weren’t alone, and that would make you feel better. It made the ache more tolerable, and enabled you to look forward once more.

Short of sitting across that table, Dan’s music on the stereo and a good bottle of wine isn’t a bad substitute. Many times, when my heart and soul ached, for many reasons, it’s what helped me.

I left Dan Fogelberg behind. I never developed a taste for his post-Innocent Age work, and my own music tastes changed as life changed me, carrying me on passing years from Dan and his peers to my current favorites. But I still carry a big torch for those days, and with the advent of iTunes, Rhapsody and the rest have found myself seeking out the music of my youth, reveling in sentimental fondness as I rediscover those songs, and the memories they awaken.

And so, I shouldn’t be surprised that I find myself sentimental over Dan Fogelberg’s death. And so irritated that it has gone so largely unremarked.

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, at that age when so many of those who composed and played the soundtrack to my youth are leaving us, making memories of that time more poignant. Maybe it’s that, because Dan’s music meant something to me, seeing his music dismissed makes me feel as if my youth and feelings are likewise being dismissed.

I imagine it’s all of that.

But also, I’m just plain pissed off at the critical pretentiousness that continues to dismiss Dan Fogelberg even in death, and the ease with which so many people mock him, for no other reason than that. Because it’s easy.

You don’t like his music? That’s fine. If you’ve given his best stuff a sincere listen and it’s not your cup of tea, then thanks for stopping by.

But if you haven’t? Listen to the clips I’ve included here. If you’re intrigued, spend a few bucks and download some tracks online. Or ask a friend, or maybe their granola-munching parents, if they’ve got some Dan Fogelberg you can borrow.

But be warned. You’ve got to kick the furniture out of the way and invite Dan in, if you’re going to appreciate him at all. You’ve got to be willing to let him nail you right smack-dab in your squishy place.

And if you find you like him – well, of course it’s okay. It’s always been okay. You don’t need my permission, or anyone’s. With anything in life, it’s never about what others say. It’s always about what you feel.

A few days after his death, longtime friend Jackson Browne called Dan Fogelberg “an angel.” Writing about him now, listening to him now, having rediscovered him now after all these years, I don’t feel inclined to disagree.

Rest in peace, Dan. And thanks.

#dan fogelberg

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christopherwatsonbooks · 2 years

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Requiem for a Heavy Bag

In the Japanese martial arts, much is made of ki.

You can think of ki, pronounced ‘key’, as vital life energy -- energy of spirit, of intent, of universal connectedness, of harmony, though those are imperfect definitions. Nor is it unique to Japanese culture -- it’s qi to the Chinese, gi in Korea, prana in Indian practices. Aikido, the martial art I studied for nearly two decades, has ki literally at its heart.

It’s said you can imbue objects with your ki, through deliberate use over time. Martial tradition cautions us not to launder our uniform belt, for example, lest we wash away the years of accumulated ki from our training. Also, the belts are cotton and shrink when they get wet. But let’s go with poetry.

The idea is that action and intention are energy and can be directed, transferred, stored and shared. Again, that’s a gross oversimplification of a far more subtle idea but it’ll get us to where we’re going.

I’ve yet to find a satisfying Western equivalent of ki. Nothing quite fits. Of course, to the typical Western mind, for which nothing exists that cannot be scientifically proven, the entire idea of ki is nonsense.

Which brings me to my punching bag.

It’s a big blue thing, four feet long and about 18 inches in diameter, weighing 75 pounds. Right below the classic Everlast logo are the words, “Official Boxing Supplier 1984 Olympic Games.”

I purchased the heavy bag used in 1997 or thereabouts, intending it as a supplement to my martial arts training. I wrestled it into the bed of my pickup, brought it home and hung it in my farmhouse garage, where I put it to regular use to that end.

But also, I really needed something to beat the shit out of.

I spent countless sessions taking out life’s trials and frustrations on that bag. Anger, disappointment, fury, depression, grief, despair, heartache, helplessness, bafflement, office politics, fruitless dreams, family drama. Cursing through gritted teeth, shouting sometimes, hammering the bag until exhausted.

I fire-hosed my ki into that bag, and it took every bit of everything I gave it. It was my meditation, my medicine, my mirror, my crucible and confessor. It was constant, always there for me. It traveled with me, aged with me.

The more ki I imbued it with over the years, the more the bag, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, transformed from an ‘it’ into a ‘thou.’ When I bowed to it before a workout, I bowed to my teacher. When I placed my palm on it after, I wasn’t touching a thing. I was clasping the shoulder of an old friend.

Twenty-five years, three different houses, two states, one bag. When one of the hanging loops broke from wear, I hung the bag from three and then, years later, from just two. When the cover cracked and split, I dressed it with duct tape. When the sand in the filler migrated to the bottom of the bag, making it cinder-block hard, I modified my drills to match.

And then, the final punch, one month ago. There was a loud ‘pop’ and a third loop broke. The bag hung canted from a single chain, swinging to and fro as I stood and stared, processing what had just happened. My old friend had given all, and now was done.

There are many things I’ve kept over the years out of sentiment, well after they’ve outlived their practical usefulness, but most of them can fit into a drawer or on an attic shelf. As long as I can feel the ki when I touch them, if only a modest spark, I hang on to them. They serve as reliquaries, keepers of fond memories, lost loves and past lessons learned, and so by their presence continue to teach.

A busted 75-pound heavy bag, however, is a bit much to hang on to. But more than that -- I felt no desire to keep it, nor to attempt repair, never mind that there was little left to salvage. I knew the best way to respect what the bag had taught me in our many years together was to recognize that our journey was over, and to let it go.

You may feel it’s ridiculous to get sentimental over a nearly 40-year-old vinyl sack stuffed with rags and sand. Science informs me that it’s just a thing, atoms and molecules in a particular arrangement, mass made of energy. True, every word of that.

But we humans, ourselves made of that same atomic stuff, are very much defined by our connections -- to each other, to beliefs, to ideas, and yes, to things. We imbue things with meaning, often without conscious intention. We create symbols, icons and associations as easily and automatically as we breathe.

Often it is these connections alone that in turn give our lives meaning, that rescue us from hopelessness, even from extinction. The power we put into them returns to us, and saves us.

So maybe, it’s my intent that defines my existence as much as anything else does. Perhaps completely.

My intention. My connections. My ki.

When expressed like this, perhaps the idea of ki isn’t quite so nonsensical after all.

I have purchased a new heavy bag. It’s very nice, an Outslayer, which I’ve never before used but everything I’ve read and heard about them has been good. I bought it new this time, not used. We’ve had several training sessions together and while it's no longer quite an it, it’s still far too early to call it a thou.

And that’s fine. If this bag lasts as long as the previous one did, it’ll likely outlast me. Which also is fine. That means we’ve got the rest of my life to get to know one another. Which is what intend to do.

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christopherwatsonbooks · 3 years

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Gatekeepers

People ask me why I self-published Covenant Spring. The short (and true) answer: I couldn’t secure an agent to rep it, nor could I place it with a publisher. But there’s a deeper reason that I feel speaks to why we all do this in the first place. Kindly settle in.

Years ago, I was represented by a very well-known NYC agent who had no luck placing my very first novel, a hard sci-fi adventure. So it goes. But he invited me to pitch him anything new. I sent him Covenant Spring, which is very much *not* sci-fi.

The agent read Covenant Spring and passed. Again, so it goes. I asked if he would give me a reference to another agent where it might be a better fit. He replied that there were plenty of potential agents in the AAR directory. Ouch.

Whether he intended it or not, I took the agent’s reply as tantamount to a newly single friend asking you to introduce them to someone nice, and you telling them that there are plenty of nice people in the phone book. In other words, buzz off. Again: ouch.

It’s a business but it pissed me off. Still does. Yet I soldiered on. Several years and dozens of fruitless queries later, I shelved Covenant Spring, convinced (nearly) that there was no audience for it. There certainly was no interest in it.

I wrote other things, one of them a paranormal murder mystery about a redneck psychic, titled The Handyman. I was living in Charleston, SC. A local publisher grabbed it and ran. It got good press and better notices. A sequel was requested.

I got halfway through the first draft of the sequel when the publisher folded. Ouch. Ever try to place a previously-published book with an agent or new publisher? Like looking for a date in the phone book, only less rewarding.

I was profoundly discouraged. How do you determine when the universe is telling you to give up, or challenging you to try harder? Where’s the line that divides faith in oneself from delusion? Am I just too blind to admit that my writing sucks?

I was pulling weeds in my back yard. Charleston, in August. Eye-stinging sweat, swarming gnats. Feeling sorry for myself. Gnawing on the (I felt) injustice of it. Cursing, muttering. Years of writing, and for f**king what? More disappointment? Why did I bother?

Why indeed. I truly considered the question for the first time in ages. I didn’t write to pay the bills -- I had a good job. More money’s always nice, but I wasn’t in this for the cash. So why was I so angry? What did I *truly* want?

I wanted people to read my stuff. That’s it. And I was angry because the designated gatekeepers -- agents, publishers -- were standing in the way of that. They were determining whether my stuff was worth reading in the first place. Because *I* was giving them that power.

@andrewvachss declares, “The lie is that writing is a meritocracy. The lie is that the cream rises to the top. The truth is that it's a crap shoot.” Because, he says, “there is no objective standard for judging writing. At all.”

He’s right. That’s how art is. It moves you, or it doesn’t. But the gatekeepers judge not whether your art is ‘good,’ but whether it’s likely to move others enough to pay for it. Fair as far as it goes -- again, it's a business -- but it's a wholly subjective judgment based on a litany of inconstant considerations, from what the arbiter du jour determines the market wants (today), to personal taste, to whether they had a satisfying morning bowel movement.

As the cliché goes, the system stinks but it’s the only one we’ve got. Only it’s not.

Maybe my writing sucks. Maybe it’s mediocre. Maybe, it’s good. Regardless, I realized I’d rather put my book directly into a reader’s hands and let *them* decide, have *them* tell me, than put another jot of energy into another f**king query letter.

I straightened my back, wiped away sweat. The yard looked great. I felt better. And a year and a bit later, here we are. You and I.

The book is Covenant Spring. I love it with all of my heart. Maybe it's destined to languish on the dusty shelf of obscurity, read by few. It'll have lots of company. Maybe it'll move one or two of those who give it a chance, in whose hearts it may inspire poetry.

Maybe no one will read this. It's an odd sensation, writing these words, knowing all they may be or are likely to be are stones tossed in a well. That the first and last time they're read is now. This moment. These words, this full stop.

That may have to be enough. Like strawberries in snow. It'll break my heart, but so it goes. Perhaps my love for my love will fade with time, but more likely I will become accustomed to turning away from it for longer times. And then I will see it again, and wonder again how I could have ever forgotten, and my heart will ache once more. Like the good Mr. @neil-gaiman's narrator, my own melancholy ocean, at the end of my own narrowing, twilight lane.

You can find Covenant Spring on Amazon. Whatever you might think of it, I’d love you to tell me. Thanks for listening.

Maybe I should pull weeds more often.

#neil gaiman #Covenant Spring #writing #andrew vachss

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christopherwatsonbooks · 3 years

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Covenant Spring, Chapter Four

No car salesman I have ever met ever planned on being one. If you have any kind of personality at all and can do basic math, you're pretty much qualified. Of course, it doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at it.

One of the guys who works at the dealership had been a dancer in a C-grade traveling male stripper revue. Another salesman had spent time in a minimum-security prison for forging his mother's signature on her checks. She’s the one who’d turned him in. He had turned his life around since, he said.

I spent a week watching training videos and reading pamphlets before my first day on the floor. The new car manager gave me some advice, which was this: "Buyers are liars."

Buyers think anything you say is a lie, which is why they will always lie to you. You can give them a car for free and they'll think the guy before them got two. But they'll swear their credit is perfect and their trade cherry even if you helped them push it in off the street and they can’t get approved to rent furniture. I once watched a repo man tow a trade right off the lot while the owner was in another salesman's office arguing over how much it was worth. We swap the stories on the floor like pictures of our pets.

It all came together for me when I started selling cars. Never mind our popular reputation. A car dealership is one of the most honest places there is. You can’t be brazen and make it work but that unspoken acknowledgement that neither of you expects the other to be completely honest, that tacit agreement, it makes everything so much easier.

Not all of us are like that but it doesn't make any real difference. If you’re convinced I’m going to screw you, I feel no obligation to persuade you otherwise. You wouldn’t believe me anyway. But the least I can do in exchange is make it as comfortable as possible for you when I bend you over.

That’s my job, you see. I can make you feel you fought the good fight. I know just what to do to make it all feel fine, even as your heart screams that it’s a lie.

If I'd been a car salesman when I met Cheryl we might still be together. I might be married to my lipstick goddess. Not that either relationship would have lasted.

. . .

My third month at the dealership, I sold a truck to a man for seven hundred dollars over full sticker price.

He was my first up of the day. You wait your turn on the floor during your shift there and whoever walks up when you're first in line is your up. That's how it works, that's showroom democracy. The guy had his little buyers' guides and internet print-outs and his rock-bottom cash prices from other dealers scribbled on his notepad and photos of cars and window stickers on his phone. He was an Informed Buyer. He was a Tough Negotiator. He was not going to Get Screwed, no sir.

Two minutes in, I knew he was a tool. The other dealerships had let him walk on lowballs they'd never honor and no one else could beat, to get him to come back. When he did, they’d come up with some reason why they couldn't sell it to him for that price anymore, jack up the cost and then beat him down with bullshit until he bought. He couldn't go back to the other dealers who wouldn't match the price because he'd called them all liars. Also, going back to them would mean admitting he was a moron. So he'd bend over and buy.

That’s what we do. You’re welcome.

And I told him so. I told him he'd been lowballed. I gave him his chance. He rapped his knuckles on my desk and demanded my Best Cash Price on the truck.

So I gave it to him. I quoted him invoice down to the penny because I knew he wouldn't believe me, and he didn't. He showed me his notepad with the prices the other lowballing pricks had given him and said to my face that I was a liar and a thief.

I felt something lift from me then, like the oppressive heat of the day suddenly removed. I felt calm, clear as a mathematician to whom the long-sought answer to a clot of numbers was at last revealed.

I took him to the used line and showed him a sweet full-size Toyota 4x4. It had just come out from the back that morning, the price wasn’t on it yet but I knew what the used manager wanted for it, and what he would take.

I jacked the sticker up by two grand. I made the guy want it. I told him he had my Best Cash Price and if he didn’t like it, he could go buy from someone else. He tough negotiated me down eight hundred dollars and I fought him over every fucking penny. He made me sweat and squirm. I cursed him. I cried murder, I begged for mercy.

At the end of the day he shook my hand, climbed into his new truck and drove off with my dick up his ass, happy as a clam.

Seven hundred dollars over sticker. The dealership made over eighteen hundred bucks off the deal. I made my week’s draw off of that one sale.

The used car manager couldn’t stop talking about it. The other salesmen couldn’t get enough of the story, they laughed and slapped me on the back and congratulated me. I was fresh legend. I had made my bones.

. . .

I’d told the buyer the truth. After that, it was on him to believe me or not. I'd given him what he'd wanted. He would brag to his friends about how hard he'd worked me, how he’d beaten me down until I broke. He’d tell that story for the rest of his life.

It’s not my responsibility. And so on.

I hadn't known I could be so good at it. Or that I could live with it so easily.

After that, I stopped fighting it. I had learned what I was. Easy as slipping on shoes.

I've never told Dad about that sale.

. . .

Month six was my worst. I exhumed dead leads from dusty files, I courted every up like a desperate lover. Only two bought, and for next to nothing. Everyone was having a bad month, which made it easier to tolerate. A little.

The new car manager was talking to someone in his office. You could see them through the wall glass. You could tell from the body language that it wasn’t a sale.

All car salesmen are paranoid, at least the ones I know are. We’re like farmers, dependent on the weather to make the rent. A dry spell sends us from cocky to desperate in a blink. It’s no way to live but the money’s good, for as long as the weather holds.

It filled the showroom like stink. No one talked. We found things to do to look busy. We wanted to look busy when the axe fell, as if whoever wasn't would determine who went home that night with the contents of their desk in a cardboard box under their arm.

The stranger left on a handshake we all saw. It was Friday. There was a new guy starting Monday, and his name was Cai.

The new car manager sat back down at his desk and studied a piece of paper.

. . .

The piece of paper was a contract, which none of us had. That was the reason Cai had been hired. He had offered to work for free.

This is what Cai told the new car manager, which we all learned later. He would work for two months with no draw, no base salary. By the end of his second month, if Cai hadn’t made for the dealership what he would have made in draw for both months, he would walk away clean. If he made his nut, they’d pay him his draw for both months plus whatever commission he'd made, and he'd be regular staff.

Cai had two conditions. The first is he would sell his way. Dress how he wanted, say what he wanted, work when he wanted. The only power any manager had was to approve his deals, or not. Condition two is that Cai would be paid in cash.

The new car manager wanted the deal in writing so that Cai wouldn’t sue for wages if he tanked.

. . .

Cai arrived early Monday, driving a Ford Ranger extended cab four-by-four, forest green, good condition. North Carolina plates, blue and red and white with the Wright Brothers plane faint behind the tag number and the words First in Flight along the bottom.

The only space we had was a cubicle in the corner of the showroom floor, looking out over the used car line. It was rookie turf, one gray prefab wall butted against the showroom glass, making a space behind it in the corner. There was a battered desk and two chairs and a telephone and a gunmetal gray filing cabinet and office supplies. Cai made it all as homey as the corner cubicle of a car dealership showroom can be, with a lamp and a cloth draped on the filing cabinet and cushions for the metal folding chairs.

The front of Cai’s desk was flush up against the prefab wall. Hanging over the desk was an oval mirror in a polished wood frame, hung horizontally. It looked old. The glass was rippled, like shallow swells in water. It made it appear almost as if you were peering through the glass, into some other place you could only glimpse through a thin layer of reflected reality. The feeling was you'd be able to see better if only the water would calm.

There were three snapshots tucked between the frame and the glass. Two of the snapshots were black-and-white. One showed a man of maybe thirty standing in front of a tractor, his arm draped over the big back tire. He was dressed in overalls and he was grinning. You could tell the tractor was new, the photo had probably been taken on the day the man brought it home.

The second black-and-white photo was of a young woman in a sundress, sitting in a wooden chair on a porch with two fat babies on her lap, a boy and a girl. The woman was plain and beautiful. Her hair was dark and long, down to her waist. She was smiling, caught in a perfect moment that rose from the photo like the scent of a flower.

The third photo was color. It was of a woman. She stood in one-quarter profile. Her face was tilted slightly down and away, partially obscured by thick curls of dark hair cascading over her shoulders. All you could see of her face was a glimpse of her smooth jaw, a sense of the curve of her neck. She wore a white blouse and tight faded jeans. Her left arm was bent, the forearm held across her belly, her right hand raised and resting between her breasts. She was standing on a riverbank, her ankles disappeared into the tall grass and weeds. She stared into the dark water.

I cannot tell you the sense of this photo. I don't have the words. I often stared at it when Cai wasn't there, careful that he wouldn’t catch me doing it. I memorized every part of it. I imagined the woman raising her head and turning to look at me, just as I dreamt of my lipstick goddess. I so wanted to see her face, to get her to turn and look at me, to reveal herself, and to ask her what it was that she was searching for in the water.

This was my first encounter with Sarabeth Dare. I didn’t know then that soon I would meet her in the flesh, that I would know her to call her by name, and that when she did first raise her head to look at me she would scare me to death. I didn't know then that she was Cai's woman, and that he had taken that photo of his one true love just days before he had told her good-bye.

. . .

The new car manager introduced Cai to us first thing Monday, which is when we all learned that he would be working for free.

We stared at him like he was from outer space. He stood next to the new car manager in the showroom. He was just shy of six feet and solid, like he had muscles built from work. He could have been a construction worker cleaned up for a job interview. He wore a white dress shirt and a tie, denim jeans and scuffed black cowboy boots. He wore a black leather belt with a pewter buckle. He had wavy brown hair worn down to his shoulders.

Cai’s eyes were dark as dirt, and when he turned them to you it was just all black, even though they must have been brown, and when the light was just right something in them glinted like sparks of mica in wet soil. Like a flicker of movement in the dark where only a moment before, you were certain you were alone.

The women in the back office never said Cai was handsome. They said he was dangerous. But they always smiled when they said it.

. . .

What I remember most about first meeting Cai was how he didn’t seem nervous, he didn’t try to be chummy or funny or self-deprecating to win us over. He nodded to us when he was introduced but didn’t say much other than hello, nice to meet you. He didn’t seem concerned about us at all, like he’d already sized us up and determined he had no reason to be, and did it just that fast.

I read something once, that some people know how to occupy their space. They’re not on their way from somewhere or on their way to someplace, even if they are. Where they stop is where they are, even if it’s for a moment it might as well be for forever. It’s not about motion, or time. It’s about presence in space and time, the quality of being present. That’s what presence means. To occupy the now.

That was Cai, best as I can explain it. I had never encountered it before. I never expected I would meet it in a long-haired country boy car salesman.

Cai took us in like we were scenery. Everyone smiled and shook his hand but I could tell it wasn’t going to last.

. . .

Once we knew we weren’t going to be fired, the bitching began. How come Cai could leave early or come in late, how come he could wear jeans and we couldn’t, how come he could miss sales meetings, how come how come.

"Work for free" is what the new car manager always said. He was enjoying his experiment immensely.

It was obvious Cai had sold before. He knew the lingo, knew the showroom drills, the politics of selling. Everyone said he was crazy, must be. It made them feel better. He was an unknown and it scared them. They said he was a dick because he kept to himself, he didn't shoot the shit on the floor between ups. He helped when he was needed and was civil when he had to talk but mainly he came in and did his job and left. You could go all day and never say a word to him, or he to you.

Cai thought he was too good for them, the others said. If he was such hot shit, how come he was selling cars?

I asked them how come they were. They asked me how come I was. I said it was because I couldn't cut it selling dog food.

After that they didn’t bother pretending anymore that they liked me. They never really had. I was the youngest one there, and I’d made everyone look bad with my used truck sale, never mind the back-slapping. I didn’t have a family to support like they did so what the hell did I know about anything?

The charade dropped and shattered like a coffee mug on the showroom tile. Jesus, I was glad to be done with it.

It’s probably why I didn’t avoid Cai like the others did. It’s not every day I meet someone like me. At least, that’s what I told myself. I listened to the others whine about Cai, wondering if people said the same things about me behind my back. I suppose it’s my own fault if they do.

I tried to feel upset about it, but I couldn’t. I felt better that I wasn’t alone anymore. I humored myself, thinking Cai and I had that much in common, that I was like him. Feeling superior makes being a dick easier to stomach. It’s pretty much a requisite, really.

. . .

Here's what happened the first month.

Cai showed up every morning and worked the floor. He didn't seem to treat his ups any differently than we did, except that most of them wound up sitting in his cubicle and chatting, sometimes for so long he’d only get one or two ups that day. Time off the floor he'd make a few calls and read, the news or a book. End of the day he'd pull locks, checking to ensure all the cars were locked and the keys not in them. Low man on the sales totem gets the privilege. And then he’d climb in his truck and leave.

By the end of the first month, Cai had only sold three vehicles. The others joked about how by the end of the next month, he might make enough to pay for the gas it took him to drive to work.

Everyone had sold more that month than Cai, including me. I wondered if he maybe he really was crazy. Maybe this is what he did, going from dealership to dealership, drinking coffee and chatting with strangers until he was kicked to the curb.

I looked in his truck but it didn’t appear as if he lived in it. He didn’t smell as if he did.

. . .

The first week of the second month, the dam burst.

People came into the dealership, asking for Cai. Most were ups Cai had had the first month, who’d left without buying. They would ask for Cai, or Cai Bass, or Mister Bass.

They always remembered his name. When’s the last time you remembered a car salesman’s name?

If Cai was busy they would wait. He always knew their names on sight and thanked them for coming back and asked if they were ready. He always asked if they were ready, and they always said yes. Some brought their families, like they were going to the movies. We had kids running around the showroom, worrying the crap out of the managers, turning us all into baby sitters.

By week two it officially became ridiculous. All day long out on the lot, you would hear the loudspeaker: "Cai Bass, you have a customer in the showroom.” “Cai Bass, you have a call on line two.” “Cai Bass, please come to the finance office.”

I was working an up and we heard Cai paged three times in ten minutes. She asked if Cai owned the dealership. Not yet, I said.

. . .

Something else happened that second month. Two things, actually.

The first is that sales picked up for the rest of us. It was going to be a record month. Maybe it simply was time for it to happen. Maybe Cai was putting out some kind of vibe. Whatever it was we all breathed it like electricity. The blood of sales and cash was pumping hot and hard through the dealership. We hit the lot to our ups with steps cracking smart on the blacktop. We were excellent lovers picking fruit ripe on the vine. You could not tell us no.

The other thing, the main thing for me that happened, is that I made coffee for Cai.

I was between customers and he had two waiting, and I heard him apologize for not having any fresh coffee. We kept a pot each of regular and decaf going for customers on the showroom floor even though we usually drank most of it ourselves, which is why the new car manager refused to buy one of those coffee pods machines. The day had been so busy we’d already gone through four carafes of regular coffee before lunchtime. I was passing by his cubicle when Cai said what he did, and I heard myself say that I would make some fresh and let him know when it was done.

You won't think there’s much to this. I've spent a lot of time remembering it, I've turned it over and over enough to wear the edges smooth. It is the pebble dropped into the water, from which the ripples swelled and spread, like Cai's mirror.

For the first time since I'd known him, Cai gave me his full attention. I can see his face now in memory. It is angled downward, not quite fully turned to me.

Now he straightens, his long brown hair falls back and his eyes are fixed on mine, dirt dark and flecked with those sparks of mica, like hammer sparks called from stone. They peer at me from under his brow like some creature at night, watchful beneath a fallen log.

It is like an ocean swell against me, like a great magnet seizing and vibrating my every particle. My lungs arrest between inhale and exhale. I cannot move, if I was on fire I would burn where I stood. The din of the world recedes from perception and rises spinning into the sky like the edges of a hurricane and I am spread molecule thin through time and place such that a puff of breath will part me into swirls of dispersed smoke, without substance enough even to muster a scream.

And then I'm back, the world is back, the assault of weight and senses returns in a great clanging slap.

Cai smiles and thanks me. He says he'll make the coffee himself. He says he’ll bring me a cup when it’s done, if I like.

I find myself in my little office, sitting at my desk. My heart will not stop pounding. It bangs in my ears like fists on a wall, drowning all other sound.

The new car manager lets me go home early.

. . .

I was terrified to sleep that night. I felt as if I were made of smoke, that the blankets would settle down through me onto the mattress as if I weren’t there. My beating heart was an engine on loan. I couldn't trust the knots that tied it into my chest.

My rational mind tells me I’m being foolish. I make arguments, I build them like careful mathematical equations but when I reach for them, they collapse. I am a ghost in the world, a projection upon a breath of fog. My weight upon the mattress is no comfort, there is no logic nor science convincing enough to satisfy me that I can sleep and be sure of waking in the morning.

I stand upon Washington’s Rock. Face lifted to the sky, the world releases me and I rise, I sail free, molecules separating until I passing through the sky or the sky passing through me is no difference. The clouds mix with my particles and I become rain, tears of myself spread in an ocean, and what I was like a sigh is released in joy, and joins with heaven.

. . .

My bladder awakened me. I got up and used the bathroom. The tiles were cold against my bare feet. I did not turn on the light. I finished and flushed and crawled back into bed.

The covers were warm. I broke wind beneath them. Thus comforted, I slept.

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christopherwatsonbooks · 3 years

Text

Covenant Spring, Chapter Three

Years went by. I worked a handful of jobs. Most aren’t worth talking about.

I moved out of the house as soon as I could afford it. I found a little apartment I could manage on my own. It had putty-colored walls and thin brown carpeting. The air conditioning carried the damp smell of everyone who had ever lived there, like a dirty refrigerator.

The day I moved out of the house, Dad presented me with a laminated wallet-sized card on which he’d carefully printed all the names and phone numbers he could think of, in case I was ever in an accident or needed help. He made me put the card into my wallet right then, even though I had most of the numbers in my phone contacts already. He kept talking as we loaded my stuff into the apartment, checking the smoke detectors and reminding me to lock the doors and windows when I was away, and to call him if I needed anything, even if he was at work. We made a date to go shopping for used furniture at the Goodwill store.

I walked him out to the car. He hugged me before he got in. I smelled his after shave, felt his soft middle-aged muscles beneath his store shirt. I was taller than he was now. It was the first time I had been close enough to him to really notice.

I sat on a box in my new apartment and cried. I wasn’t sure why.

. . .

I bought a used car, a crappy little oil-burning Toyota. I spent most of my spare cash on books, and read most of them. I hardly ever invited anyone over because I'm a dick.

I'm not trying to be funny. I know how I am around people. I'm not easy to get along with. I don't try to be a dick but there's just not that much that anyone has to say that interests me, most people anyway. Most of it is obvious or ignorant, or tedious social prattle, or just plain bullshit.

I find it all exceptionally difficult to tolerate. I suppose I could try, or try harder, but it’s not worth the effort to me. Inevitably, I’ll find myself having to say something meaningless just to be social or having to pretend that someone didn’t just say something stupendously asinine, just to be polite.

People think I'm arrogant because I don’t say much. It's easier to let them think that than it is to pretend to be friendly. When I attempt the required contortions, I wind up castrating my point, stumbling over my own attempted courtesy to the degree that I end up sounding like a moron.

The trouble with being nice for its own sake, with being courteous in the face of imbecility, is that the very people who require you to make the effort will mistake you for a pussy. Speak plain, and you’re a dick.

So I’m a dick. I don’t see that it’s my responsibility to coddle your delicate sensibilities or make you comfortable in your ignorance. I can’t help it if you jump when I slap my coins on the counter. Grow the fuck up.

There. I’m done.

It would’ve been nice to have had some company, though.

. . .

Dad I can talk to. We made it a point to have dinner together once a month. It's nice to buy dinner for your dad. He always offered to pay and sometimes I let him, when I saw he needed to. I would get the tip then.

“How is she?” I would ask. I didn’t have to say who.

“The same,” he would say. And we would move on, careful not to open that door too wide, easing it closed.

I felt I had to ask, to at least recognize that she was a part of things, if for no other reason than that she still took up space in our world, and so must be acknowledged.

. . .

Most of the time, though, I fantasized about women. I thought about them constantly. I imagined the feel of their smooth shoulders beneath my hands, the softness of them pressed against me, their warm scent. I ached for it.

I loved to watch women in bookstores, beautiful smart women opening book covers to feed their souls. Their slim fingers pulling their hair back, tucking it behind their ear, that perfect smooth curve of neck revealed.

You women, you moved through the world like goddesses to me. Do you know the power you had, cool and perfect so that it split my heart to see you. I never dared approach, because I would not have been able to bear had you turned away. But you being there gave me what hope I had. Like a dream of a kiss, better left sweet in sleep than spoiled by waking.

. . .

I'd had two girlfriends my whole life. The first was Leslie, in high school. She was plain, with clean, straight blonde hair and button-down blouses with khaki skirts and a little small mouth already trained in that smile some girls have, studied sweetness and insurmountable distance all projected with a twitch of dimple. We studied in the library, and sometimes we went to movies together. Leslie always called her parents right after we got there and just before we left to go home.

Hanging with Leslie was like eating vanilla ice cream. It wasn't as good as chocolate or strawberry but it was better than no ice cream at all.

She sent me a happy graduation card, signed “Love, Leslie.” She might as well have written any word in the language, for all the meaning it had. Love was just a word, something girls like her dispensed like heart-shaped candies, to be nice.

Leslie went to Rutgers on a scholarship, to study psychology. I saw her at the mall a few years later, on the other side of the promenade. She looked precisely the same, as if she’d been in storage since we last saw one another. I thought about going over to say hi, but I didn’t. I’d still be precisely what I’d been to her when we’d shared time together. A stranger.

Dear Leslie. I hope you’re doing well. Love, Danny.

. . .

The other woman was Cheryl. She was twelve years older than me and sold advertising for a local newspaper. I met her at the pet store where I worked for a while.

Working at the pet store taught me why so many women rescue strays and work in animal shelters. I saw them at the store all the time. They were either fat and wearing sweat clothes or heroin thin, with old faces, like books abandoned open to the elements.

Nadine was a bus driver, she came in every week and bought forty pounds of kibble and a big box of biscuits. She had seven dogs. When she told me, I said how it must be a handful to have so many. Nadine said better dog shit on the rug than a drunk asshole with no job on the couch.

Pow. I don't laugh at dog and cat people now like I used to. Just the obviously crazy ones.

Cheryl had an orange tomcat tabby named Rusty, neutered. I learned to remember the difference between neutered and spayed because neuter and nuts begin with the same letter. You use whatever works.

Cheryl wasn't a fat cat person. She dressed in business suits and had auburn hair. She wore lots of makeup that looked like she'd spent an hour on it, like the porn star anchors on cable TV news.

Cheryl made it easy to flirt. Cheryl taught me that I could say certain things to certain women in a certain way without fear that I’d be taken seriously. I said things to Cheryl that would have had Leslie calling her dad in a panic.

One afternoon, Cheryl asked if I'd ever thought about having sex with her. She said it was okay if I had.

I was twenty-two when I lost my virginity. Maybe you think that’s late. I don’t think it matters. Once you do it, you’re doing it. The rest is just practice.

All Cheryl and I did was have sex. It was all she wanted, and I couldn’t find reason to object. She showed me what to do and let me know when I got it right. She didn’t have a headboard on her bed, so sometimes the top of her head would thump against the wall, bump-bump-bump. Whenever I was on top I put a pillow between her head and the wall. I was a considerate lover. It's funny as hell now, to think about it.

Sometimes Rusty would jump up on the bed while we were at it. “Rusty, go!” Cheryl would say, her head thumping against the wall. And Rusty would obediently jump off of the bed. He’d curl around Cheryl’s bare ankles when she showed me to the door. “Isn’t he a good kitty?” Cheryl would say, and then tell me good-bye, and close the door in my face.

Cheryl would never come to my apartment. She let me buy her dinner, once. We'd been doing whatever we were doing for six weeks. At the restaurant she was nervous. She didn't say much and hardly ate. She tried to pay when we were done and became angry when I insisted on paying instead.

We didn't have sex that night. She said she was tired and I left her at the curb in front of her apartment and watched her click-clack up the paved walk and disappear inside without a glance behind her.

I called Cheryl the next day and left a message, but she never called back. She never came back to the pet store. At least not while I was there.

I drove by her apartment a while later. Her car was there, the light was on. I didn’t stop. I didn’t know what I would say.

Maybe if I'd been more like Rusty.

. . .

Here is the most remarkable thing I remember from those years. The one single most memorable thing.

I was standing beneath a shop awning one afternoon in the summer, on the little main street in our town. It had begun pouring rain, out of nowhere.

I'm deciding whether to wait or make a run for my car, when I see her. She's approaching from my right, walking like there's no rain. She doesn't have an umbrella and she doesn't care.

She's soaked to the skin, her blouse is sticking to her, her wet hair is pulled back from her forehead.

She stops by a car parked at the curb and applies lipstick in the side-view mirror, in the rain. The tops of her breasts glisten, the dark space between them opens as she bends over.

I see her as I write this. I can smell the wet asphalt, and the rain. There she is, in her astonishing glory.

I have constructed entire conversations we might have had, entire lives.

She looks up, and there I am before her. I say what I say, just the perfect thing to make her fresh-painted lips smile, to make her wonder if I might be worth some of her time.

From that moment, that space in the heartbeat slowing of the world around you as you await the next, the rest proceeds.

That's all you need, if you can get it. That alone can make up for everything else. You won't need a map to make yourself real.

I hadn't met CeeCee then.

. . .

The pet store closed, driven out of business by a big-box discount chain that opened a half-mile away. I had thirty days to find a new job.

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christopherwatsonbooks · 3 years

Text

Covenant Spring, Chapter Two

I graduated with my class. My yearbook photo shows me standing in front of a pine tree with my arms crossed, staring off into the distance.

Before he snapped the photo, the photographer said the same thing to me that he’d said to everyone else. Smile, and think of your future.

I am not smiling in my photo.

Marcel Marceau said in a speech once something to the effect that the reason lying isn't one of the seven deadly sins is because it's necessary. You can't tell someone you love that they're ugly.

It rocked me when I read that. I wished I had read it earlier. It would have been a great comfort to me. A man who made art out of silence. It would have been nice to think myself an artist, rather than a hypocrite.

You have to be careful when you tell the truth. The truth and honesty aren't the same thing. Honesty is not lying. The truth is an atom bomb that can blow the world apart.

I knew this back then, years before I could articulate it. Most kids do. You can tell when they learn it because like I did, they stop talking.

Adults always say they want kids to talk, but kids know that's a lie. Most adults want kids to agree. They only want talk like a sonar ping, to satisfy them of existence and proximity. They don’t want to listen, they only wish to avoid surprise. They want honesty like they want a pistol pulled from a pocket and laid on a table, where it can be seen.

There’s a moment in every life when something happens to inform you that the truth isn’t holy. It comes like a shotgun blast, and you’re left holding your guts in your hands, with what you thought was true red and slick and squirming between your fingers as you try to shove it back into where it will no longer fit. All you’re left with is the pain of the greater truth you’ve learned. That your faith can be so blithely betrayed, that nothing is so sacred, no trust so inviolate, that it can’t be profaned.

The pain of this learning becomes your new truth. The pain is the only proof that you're real, that you are not yet a part of the obscene conspiracy. It is precious. It is the only absolutely real and honest thing you have that’s truly and completely yours.

And so, you don’t talk. You will not contribute to the grand lie. You will tolerate the mocking, the beatings, the loneliness. You tolerate it because your pain bears you though it, the righteous mirror in which everyone and everything else is reflected and shown to be shit.

Except for you. You are a poet. You are a pure and noble warrior. You will be the last and only true, and you will not falter nor surrender. You will not relinquish your truth, even if it means your own death. If you must, you will sharpen it to keep you strong. Sitting at your desk, pale and proper and beautiful as your blood drips freckles on the dirty classroom floor.

. . .

Listen to me. You must not steal this and make it into nothing. You must respect it. If you don’t, the death poets will do something to make you understand.

Click-click boom! Are you listening now?

. . .

I wish I could take all those kids who blew their friends’ brains out in school and give them bicycles.

We would ride to the top of Washington's Rock together. All of your pain and your anger, put it into your pumping legs and hard breath. Spit the lies like grit from your mouth.

At the top we will stand together on trembling legs with the breeze cool on our sweaty faces. We don't have to talk. We will look out over the world now below us and take our yearbook photos and SAT scores and talks with the guidance counselor and all the adult bullshit, we will crumple it all in our plump young fists and throw it as far as we can into the dusk.

When you're ready, we will return. We will coast together down the hill like free sailors on the wind. When we reach the flat road we will pump the pedals again, we will watch the car headlights blink open to the dusk and breathe the cool exhaust-scented air, and be strong.

I’m so sorry for you if you can’t remember. How like a sin that we ever forget it.

. . .

The night I told Dad I wanted to go to college we were sitting in the dining room, sharing dinner. It was my mother's canasta night with her friends up the street so we were by ourselves. We had ordered pizza and fried calamari from our favorite Italian delivery place. Even their mild sauce is too hot for most people, but Dad and I loved it.

Dad was still in his white short-sleeved golf shirt from the department store where he works as the lawn and garden department manager. He's worked there for as long as I can remember, selling lawn mowers and string trimmers and tillers and mulch. All the people in the neighborhood go to Dad to buy their lawn things.

Dad had spilled some sauce on his shirt the very second I had asked him if he could help me go to college. He dipped his paper napkin in his water with lemon, which is what he almost always drinks, and he dabbed at the stain so that he wasn't even looking at me when he told me that he didn't have to money to send me to college, not a four-year college. But maybe if I wanted to go to a two-year college or tech school, maybe we could swing that, if I got a job to help pay.

I watched him dabbing at the stain on his shirt until he stopped. He lowered his hands into his lap. His head was still down, looking at the stain. All he had done was smear it.

I could tell it was killing him, having to tell me he couldn't afford to send me to college, and then having to look so ridiculous wiping that stain because if he'd just left it alone while he spoke it would have been like pretending he wasn't wearing a clown nose.

I'd wanted to strangle whatever god there might be for having done that to him. It makes me angry to remember it, even now as I’m writing this. But what I told Dad was that it sounded like a fair deal, I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted to go but I would get a job and save money and live at home and think about it, and when I had enough I'd maybe go to a two-year college, if I still wanted to, and if I did I would appreciate all the help he could give me with that.

He nodded then and looked up. I saw his eyes and said I was full and he said he was, too. He said he had to go change his shirt.

The boards in his bedroom creaked over my head as I folded the pizza box and put it with the rest of the cardboard for recycling. I heard him walk to the bed and I guess he sat down. The boards didn't creak for a long while.

. . .

That's when I knew I wouldn't be going to college. I really didn’t want to go, I don’t think. Dad gave me the excuse I needed. I was grateful.

It almost killed me, what I saw when Dad looked up. I was telling him I wanted to go away and leave him alone, alone with my mother and his evening back yard smokes and an empty bedroom down the hall with no music behind the door. I got a peek into the deep and murky water and saw a middle-aged guy in a white short-sleeved shirt who sold lawn mowers at a department store and lived with an alcoholic wife and couldn’t afford to send his only child to college.

I'm sorry, Dad. If I'd known I swear I never would have said anything.

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christopherwatsonbooks · 3 years

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Covenant Spring, Chapter One

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. I’m terrific at touting someone else’s work -- it’s something I’ve done for decades to pay the bills. But when it comes to my own writing, my inherent aversion to calling attention to myself gets in the way. It just feels unseemly to boast. I’m also sensitive that others, like you, might find it off-putting.

Unfortunately, no one’s going to discover my writing unless I keep talking about it. And unless I also do something else I find quite difficult, which is to ask for help.

I need lots of people -- like you -- to read Covenant Spring and then write a review for it on Amazon, as well as spread the word via social media, word of mouth, book-loving friends and clandestine dalliances. As I said before, I just want to get the damn thing read. I really would give it away for free, if I could, but Amazon wants money for doing their part to help. Which seems fair.

But that doesn't mean I can't share some of it here. Maybe all of it. So let's give that a go.

Below, you’ll find the first chapter to Covenant Spring, which you can purchase on Amazon in ebook and softcover formats.

I'd really appreciate your help getting the word out about Covenant Spring. It’s about love and God and murder and sex and truth and lies and finding one good thing in your life to believe in, something to make weathering the rest of the s**t worthwhile. There’s also some excellent inside scoop about car sales. Really.

Check out the first chapter below and let me know what you think.

Chris

***

Covenant Spring

Foreword

All of the places in this story are real but I've changed their names and where they are, so if you try to follow the directions I give to Covenant Spring you’ll wind up someplace else entirely, past the New Covenant Presbyterian Church and Miz Dori's neat white house, past the dirt road into the woods by the swamp where Mister Silas lives, over and beyond the little cement bridge, where I held Aaron's hand and faced down Pastor Lamm, with the storm black and howling over our heads and the world a tick from ruin.

Some of the events I have changed for certain reasons that ought to be clear by the end. I've also changed the names of everyone involved, except my own, for the same reasons. So if you think you see yourself in here it’s not intentional but you can’t say it's all that surprising, the world being what it is.

. . .

Chapter One

My name is Daniel Ivy and I live in New Jersey. I’ve lived in Jersey all my life. I was born and raised in a typical Jersey town, which I know won't mean a thing to you if you haven't been here. There are worse places to grow up, and any place is fine when you’re a kid and don’t know any better.

My hometown is small. You might find it on a good state map. It's about an hour west of New York City, identical to the towns that surround it, like interlocking amoebas in a petri dish. Millions of squirming souls captured in a drop of dirty water, fighting over parking spaces. It’s home because it’s where I was born and grew up, and that’s the end of it. It’s difficult to get sentimental about asphalt and strip malls.

When I was younger I liked to search maps for my hometown. Big paper maps, atlases, the kind that showed the entire world. My town was never more than the smallest dot if it was listed at all, but I was always glad to find it. It meant we were real.

Our existence, officially confirmed.

. . .

There's a place one town over from where I was raised. It’s called Washington's Rock. During the Revolutionary War, General Washington is said to have stood there on the high ridge and observed troop movements in the valley below. It's also said he often went there to meditate, whether he would win or be hanged, I suppose. People drink there now and get stoned, and scrawl obscenities and the names of who they’re hooking up with at the moment on the tall granite marker erected where a ghost once stood and contemplated death, hope and honor. The limbs of the trees at the bottom of the ridge drip with sun-faded trash and used condoms, like tinsel.

I spent a lot of time on Washington's Rock as a kid. The road to the top is long and narrow, and it plunges at the shoulder into trees and rock. Trucks are banned from it. It’s alpine steep, and laid in serpentine turns around which it's impossible to see a chubby kid on a bicycle until the last moment.

It is a dangerous road, my parents warned me, back when I was the age when dangerous was intoxicating. The feel of a dangerous thing, a forbidden thing, was sexual in its allure. To brave the slender bending limbs at the crest of a tall tree, or to dash across the teeming interstate with my friends. These are the trials of early manhood for suburban boys. We would dance nervous on the highway shoulder and then dive into the diesel avalanche, through doppler-shifting horn blasts, knowing even then, even that young with our legs shaking and gulping breaths coming precious and hard on the other side, that we’d done something. You weren’t quite the same person you had been moments before. You had done a dangerous thing, a stupid thing, and had been changed.

But it wasn’t stupid. It built me by small degrees like daubs of clay pressed on a frame. It gave me weight in the world, an earned power that was mine alone, and was important.

It took everything I had to pump the pedals and make it to the top of Washington’s Rock. The passing cars kicked their grit in my face, their horns blasted hurled curses. But I dared not stop. The road was so steep that if I stopped, I knew my legs wouldn’t find the power to push the pedals anew, and I would think about giving up. And if I gave up, I would be that much smaller, diminished by it forever, and I might never try again.

So I did not allow myself to quit. The trial made me real. There was nothing else I had then that possessed the power and magic to make me much of anything.

. . .

I knew a girl in middle school named Shelly. I saw her one day in class pressing the point of a nail file into her arm under her desk until she bled. Her face was as composed as a cameo the whole time. She saw me watching her and she put the file back in her purse and returned her attention to the blackboard like nothing at all had happened.

I read years later that a lot of young women hurt themselves like that, mostly women, but nothing I ever read explained why. It was a disease. It was a disorder, a warning sign. A warning of what, no one seemed to know. But if you saw it, you were supposed to tell someone. You were supposed to take action.

Shelly was beautiful. She was pale and doe-eyed and slender. She wore nice clothes and got excellent grades. She waited every day after school out front, her books embraced against her chest like body armor, waiting for her mother to come in their giant SUV and pick her up.

They found Shelly that summer in her bedroom. She had found some pills and washed them down with liquor from her parents’ wet bar. The local paper wrote about it on the front page, how Shelly might never wake up and how it was such a senseless tragedy, as if there was such a thing as sensible tragedy. How it was such a shame that it had happened to so beautiful a young woman, as if good skin should have been enough for her.

“She was so beautiful,” everyone said. As if that was all they could see.

Kids visited Shelly for a while in the hospital. They took turns caring for her, talking to her, playing her favorite music for her, brushing her hair. The nurses showed them how to turn Shelly every few hours and position pillows under her so she wouldn’t get bedsores, and how to clean the site where her feeding tube punched a hole into her stomach, and how to empty her urine and colostomy bags. Shelly’s friends at school set up an online crowdfunding site for her and held fundraisers for the family to offset medical bills when insurance ran out, “We Heart Shelly” dances and 10K walks and bake sales. A local car dealership held a raffle for a new vehicle. Save Shelly, win a Toyota.

Then after a while, no one talked about it anymore. Everyone forgot about Shelly until she died two years later, a wax doll skeleton in pink sweat clothes, resembling her former beautiful self as much as a paper sack resembles a tree.

It would have been better if Shelly had been shot in the head, or had died in a car crash. I’ve heard others say it, families and friends of people injured like Shelly, the ones who have to live with the unromanticized pain, who can’t go home and leave it behind. The ones who have to wear the rubber gloves and clean the fluids and feces, and exhausted wrestle tormented with their love against the slow expiration of hope, and the guilt of wishing more each day for death’s blessed mercy.

If the crease from living Shelly to dead Shelly had been sharper, it might have cut us more than it did. A knife to awaken us. Useful pain, instructive pain, stopping our lives, making us ponder more than it did.

Remember Shelly? What a shame. Her poor family. Gee, how long ago was that?

The newspaper ran a story: Local Girl Dies After Two-Year Battle.

It wasn’t a battle. It was decomposition. The battle ended when Shelly said so.

Two years for the edge to dull, until it drew no blood at all. Maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have so easily forgotten her. But Shelly Christ did not give her life with the intention of making us see. It was about us, but it was never for us.

. . .

I’ve never told anyone about what I’d seen Shelly do, until now. Maybe if I had said something, I sometimes think, she might be alive now. But I think that’s arrogant. I don’t have that power. I don’t know what I would have said or done. I didn’t know her.

Maybe if I’d tried, maybe she would have let me be her friend. I don’t know if it would have made a difference. Maybe I only would’ve gotten in her way.

I think I should have tried, though. I still feel that I missed something big by not trying. And I didn’t understand power, not then.

. . .

I wondered why I was drawn to Washington’s Rock. Sometimes I would just find myself there, having set out on my bike with no conscious intention of going. I’d find myself at the bottom of the hill, waiting for the silent something that moved me from stillness — some hunger shown food, some decision I never was conscious of making, an impetus like a whisper, the only evidence of which is the echo I hear after I’ve begun.

Washington's Rock was my trial, my very own. Making it to the top gave me power, and freedom.

I walk around the trees, hot and panting and sweat-soaked and then, there is the entire world, spread out below me.

I stand on the marker and extend my arms, I outstretch my hands over it all. I can feel the press of the tiny houses and the billows of green against my palms. I spread my will over them and hold it suspended, like the sky. How lucky they all are to be ignorant of me, those tiny, stupid people. So ignorant of my power, for all I have to do is lower my hands and crush them all. And in their last moments, only then would they finally understand. Then they would know how stupid they were, how they had until that last terrible moment, when it was utterly too late, understood absolutely nothing.

But other times, I would fly. I would raise my hands with my palms upward and feel myself becoming light and I would rise like a flock of birds set loose from my heart, so high above the dull world and the stupid people in it. Soaring through the clean, cold air, my blood and breath transformed to joy, knowing at last that I was free.

I didn’t think of it then as prayer.

Maybe that’s what Shelly felt. Maybe that’s why I can’t forget her. Maybe I could have taken her with me and shown her another way, given her a trial that she could weather. Maybe she would have come out on the other side born anew, even if only for a little while, with a defining something other than pain that was completely hers, that was earned. And maybe she would have kissed me in thanks, the one person who understood, and we would both have had another thing to make us real.

But then always, I would feel my weight again, and I would open my eyes and be standing on the rock. But maybe just before, just moments before, I truly had been free. Maybe the world returned only because I opened my eyes expecting to see it.

The world is strong, but one day I would be strong enough to remove myself from it completely, I vowed. One day, I would ascend into the real and become my true self, forever, with no hope or desire of returning. I would be awesome and terrible to behold, and everyone then would know how deadly stupid had been their decision to dismiss me.

I carried this with me as a comfort. It is the closest thing I had to religion then. That, and searching for myself on maps.

. . .

My mother and I argued. I screamed at her but my voice was never strong enough. If only it had been, I could have blasted her with my power and then she, too, would know. That she had better stop and ponder, and wonder if what she was doing would one day prove dangerous.

I did not like my mother. I felt no obligation to. Any animal can give birth. Ten seconds after that’s done, you have to earn the rest.

My mother didn't understand. She would tell me to stop shouting. It didn't matter what we were shouting about or whether she had shouted first. "Stop shouting!" she would hiss, as if we were creating a scene in a restaurant. She would repeat it over and over, never looking at me until I went away, and she would make another drink.

I learned to give my mother my silence. I made myself easy for her to ignore. I gave her nothing, other than what was necessary to pass through her space. I learned to turn my mind from the wet crawl of her eyes on me, the slurp of her taking a drink. Sometimes she would say things but they were just rocks. I was too far away, and she didn't have the reach. I think she was grateful.

That silence was all we had in common. Except for blood, which can't be denied but is easy to ignore, once you make up your mind to do it.

. . .

There was a time when Dad tried to play peacemaker. I would stop arguing when he did, for him.

I love my dad. When I was still at home, I would hear my mother shouting at him downstairs, sometimes in fury, other times with words that cut but held no truth. She only wanted to hurt him. Usually dad would speak so low I couldn't hear him, so it sounded as if my mother was cursing a ghost.

Many times the front door would slam hard enough to rattle the windows in my bedroom. Then I would hear the fridge door open, and the cabinet where she kept the bottle, which was right beneath my room. And sometimes I would hear her cry, and I would turn up my music, just enough so I couldn't hear her but not so loud that she could hear me do it. It made me feel something that I had enough left to give her that, at least.

"Your mother is having a tough time," Dad would explain, though he never said with what. I don't think he knew. If he had, I don’t know how he could have explained it to me then so I would understand. I was in their world, and what bound them together was to me like a monster swimming in a dark swamp, a great merciless shape obscured in the murk whose silent approach I felt like a wave as it neared.

I would make myself small then, I would press myself against the walls in fear and pray it did not crush me as it passed because whatever it was, it did not see me at all.

It terrified me worse than dying.

Dad rescued me. His familiar footsteps on the carpeted stairs, the squat shadows of his feet against the crack of hallway light below my closed bedroom door. Three light taps. I never played my music so loud that I wouldn't be able to hear them.

Sometimes we talked for hours in the dark, with long silences between clumps of sentences like the highway between towns. Sometimes he drove and sometimes I did. And then, there would come a stretch of highway and I would feel his weight rise from the end of the bed, and his warm hand would squeeze my arm, and the door would close softly behind him, leaving the faint odor of after shave and cigarettes.

Dad always goes outside when he smokes. I would hear the screen door creak and close, and I would rise from my bed and go to the window and see him on the back patio. Sometimes he would just stand there, and sometimes he would walk slowly around the little yard that I mowed every weekend. He would move in and out of the next-door neighbor's yellow porchlight spill, in and out of the shadows cast by the high forsythia bushes along the fence. His hand would come up to his mouth, and I would see the little orange dot flare bright in the dark as he inhaled. His hand would swing down by his side and I knew he was exhaling but I would watch the cigarette cherry as it faded, seeing how long I could make it out before it went away completely, counting the seconds.

Sometimes he would be like that for an hour, smoking one cigarette after another, like he knew he had to smoke them all right then before he went back inside for the last time that night. Back on duty, back to my mother who with her vodka breath had ordered him and his cigarettes out of his house.

I always made sure there were no lights on in my room when I watched him. I didn't want him to look up and see my silhouette in the window. I wasn't afraid he would be angry. I didn't want to rob him of his religion.

Dad amazes me, what he tolerates. I don't know what my mother once was that made him fall in love with her, but it's gone now. Maybe there's just enough of it left that only he can see that keeps him there.

I think it's more that he feels sorry for her. If she can't love him, then he will protect her. That at least he can still do. He will be dutiful. It is the only way he has left to show her his love. The only way she will accept, even as she curses him for it.

If I think about it too long, the sadness of it breaks my heart.

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