Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

By Paul Hawkins

Set in the sub-suburbs, where trailer park and white-flight suburb rub elbows, a young man tries to escape the shadow of his brilliant but despairing father, only to find himself subjected to the same temptations to find the answers to life in a device designed to talk to angels or the dead. Faustian, with humor and pathos, where temptation lies between the car graveyard, the baitshop, and the abandoned mall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Hawkins
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516396894

Paul Hawkins

American author. I am happy to be a child of the space age and I still set my sights on great things. I put humor in everything I write because that is my disposition. If I chronicle the 20th century it is only because I have not given up on the 21st.

Book preview

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—-

Success in Cirrcuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—-

Author’s Note: I have consulted the characters’ own notes and recollections to tell this story to the best of my ability. It is not my fault that some of them are slightly addled. None of them set out to lie, I don’t think, but may lie to themselves. That happens when people retell the past to themselves so they can live with it. Special thanks to Rosalind Russell, who thoroughly interviewed the other participants in order to sift the truth from fiction and, in the process, now remembers events she never actually attended.

Chapter -Prologue - by Blaise Bohrs

Vacuum Tube Technology

It's 1939, and a boy on a farm without alternating current could have told you more about the world than a Ph.D. student can today. He drank in the newsreels, he scoured the magazines left in the hotel lobby or the barbershop for knowledge, he pulled in the news from the air, from the antenna of his crystal radio hooked to his window screen. He heard the voices and saw the visions in his mind and poured them into his bottomless thirst to reach out beyond the humdrum landscape visible from his window. The world was bigger in the 1930’s.

The world was bigger both in one's mind and outside it. There were more pieces to it and they didn’t need to fit together. There were quarter-mile grey dirigibles humming transatlantic routes across grey transoceanic skies to and from grey photographic skylines; there were champagne corks popping in tall business-dealing offices; there were farmers turning soil and driving home-modified Model T’s across brown acres, proud odd time-saving home-welded metal arms clawing dust inventively and effectively while horses and mules watched and twitched their ears; there were crystal radio antennas attached to window screens in a farm boy’s stuffy boxy upstairs room in Summertime, with cicadae hatching and humming in the acacia in the yawning purple-then-black world outside, and his younger brother’s already out like a light and snoring, but this boy at 13 or 14 is just beginning to realize that out in the sweetening and cooling darkness is something precious he is missing, something his heart has a hole in it for, something he is yearning to find.

And always there were the silver signals, bounced by hucksters and amateurs alike across the invisible skies - the breath of angels, the news or dreams or bragging of a ham radio operator in Enid or Sydney or Sioux City or Cleveland or St. Louis, and the soap-sponsored radio crooners and the comedians with their guffawing but genteel audiences in some unseen New York auditorium, all laughing, the jokes like razor-thin silver signals a morse code of surrender and defiance in the blackness, leisure and desperation, a silver stab easy yet resolutely made at the thing closing in, a signal fading in and out while the boy hears the distracting noise of his brother's buzzing and the prowling of cats in the field in the alley on the fire escape down on the porch getting into the garbage cans or the milk pails below, oh shut up just get to the punch line this time please and yes, the line then the laughter, crackling like tinfoil or popguns or static and the darkness pushed back for an instant, the link made with the people all of us laughing, and maybe out there one who laughs at a lot of things that he does, and maybe out there someone who wants to know him, before the sponsor's slogans send him off to fight for banks and brand name soap.

The airwaves were fairs and carnivals and home to liars - not confessors, like now, folks who drop their drawers before any camera and expose lives or souls - not confessors, liars, showmen, each with his lie, his own outlandish world bumping the gaudy farcical sphere of someone else - the wolf-boy the faith healer the pygmy shaman the snake oil mystic Hindu the anatomically-gifted farm girl the albino spelunker the cheesy British comedian with his parrot who won't talk on live radio, the bubble dancer the Mister, I seen Jesus transient the refugee the Shadow. Their lie with and against your lie - you're an enigma you're special a mystery no oath no credo no uniform can confine you you're a thing; you're old you're young you're dying in the farmhouse with the grandkids shooed outside, you're on a train to meet a girl you've only written letters to before, you're in a big unfamiliar city with two dollars in your pocket wondering which way to turn at the corner, you're in a line you're bunked in a mission you're in a field you hear a laugh; you're in school you're a single woman with her first real job in a new city and all the men are jerks, you're black you're Irish you're Czech you're German you're hated, you're left behind you're ditched by your friends or you've ditched them for anything new, you've moved with no clear guide though with the silver signals; you spark and fade like signals in the vacuum tubes - part of you is airy angel, and you're free.

My father and mother grew up in the 1930's, did their part in World War II, and then set about making the American Century.

The Sub-Suburbs

The sub-suburbs are a place where the suburbs themselves peter out; the white-flight myth of indulgence without responsibility can push its cul-de-sacs no further and collapses upon itself, lost, lost. Property values fall; trailer home and manor home rub elbows; angels, beasts, and men co-mingle, each out of their element. Nothing is what it seems but everything has the kernel of what it can be. The Sub-Suburbs are the fringe of Being and Becoming, the mundane rediscovering the mysterious; they are often marked by a convenience store in the middle of nowhere.

Chapter 1: Blaise

From Blaise’s Journal

My name is Blaise Bohrs. I grew up in the sub-suburbs of an Oklahoma prairie petropolis in the 1980’s. I started writing this journal in prison to tell you about my life.

But first I want to posit this: there are no stories of our lives. They're things we try on like gloves, test for the fit, wear for a while, then outgrow and discard. We tell stories about ourselves but finally we just throw them away and the most they ever did was enable us to move between sources of cover.

Having said that, here's my story: My older brother Ben and his wife both had jobs in the first of this community's mega stores back in the early 1980's, and both were in their first year at the closest can't-decide-what-to-do-with-my-life community college, barely launched free from the diminishing inner-city neighborhood my family lived in then, where class-bounding blue-collar dreams blossomed.

My old man was stricter back then and so was hers and these two kids knew they mattered. They had seen friends go bad and didn't want to be losers. At that college barely more than a high school they studied all day, and then all night they worked at that first mega-bargain department store, wearing smocks and working in mile-high anonymous white aisles, she on the register he stocking shelves. They met sometime just after eleven one night when the other employees were orchestrating hijinks in the wide deserted aisles and both he and she hung back, too shy, and joked with one another to seem too occupied to be called on to participate in the foolishness. They talked about where they were from and where they were going, found that for eighteen years they'd lived in the same working-class neighborhood only three blocks apart; they mentioned their serious studies and their goals, went out that weekend, fell in love and got married six months later, and never looked back with regret. They lived every day still madly in love with each other. They had a nice house, not ostentatious but just right for them, warm, safe, small. They had a little daughter who really isn't that little anymore, and they were always growing but staying whole and certain of themselves and happy.

It must have been simpler back then. When I was a kid and my older brother would visit he would seem like nothing less or more than a mysterious happy god to me, and he could always outwrestle me with one laughing, easy pin but couldn't chip a golf ball worth a damn, and he got tired of even the most cordial visit by early evening and would shift his big shoulders uncomfortably on the sofa, herd his lovely wife and child into the car and disappear back to the glow of his own warm and orderly enclave in the inner city - a happy, geometric, centered space he understood, a place he could hold complete in his mind.

It was the model I set for myself but it never materialized.

A girl I once loved knew a similar story and she'd tell it to me as we looked out at stars from the back seat of my car, and it was her goal to live up to it so it became mine as well. And she was young and beautiful and smart like the people in the story and I was too. But we were not so lucky and it turned out we had no straight road, and we made it too fast around the first curve and one of us got lost from sight of the other, and if I chose this minute I could get up from this chair and there would be no more waiting, no more watching for her, and everything could be new. But she left and Dad died and I got lost and stuck in time, and then bad things happened.

*

I am an electrical repairman's son. Oh, my father was more than that - he understood the math and the physics and the secret ways of electronic things, but all that theory is no good if a man can't make money, so my father was an electrical repairman, back when people didn't used to throw whole TV's away. He never could obey anyone else so he worked for himself or with his partner.

He also fought in World War II and was of the generation that made the world safe and free and more or less American and at once made it indefinably greater and smaller than it had been. Safe, clean, tidy - for a while - different food but the same Levi’s, the sitcoms from Sheboygan to Shanghai.

I grew up in an inner city Catholic neighborhood, but when our friends' families sprang on sudden lucre to the white flight neighborhoods up north, we did too - or thought we had. Like everything else my father attempted, he messed it up. We ended up not in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac, but in a tilting farmhouse one notch farther away, one century older - a place my father's car-graveyard owning brother Dave had guaranteed the city would grow out to any minute but never did.

At least, it didn't build out there for decades, and in those times my father sank into despair, and I sank into despair and had adventures, or misadventures, but as they say I am clean and sober now, and I am ready to move on. I can sit on the tin steps of my dented, tarnished silver airstream trailer on the back acres of my father's 40-acre farm and see where they are building a new mega-church out here in the hinterlands of Oklahoma's foremost metropolis, after decades of inertia. I can sit in the twilight and watch the last puffs rise from the yellow and black dirt movers,