Fragments of Philosophers' Stone: Essays and Stories

By John Paddison

The setting for Fragments is Southern California in the 1950s; the main character in the story is Joel Sheppard, a child growing up in the tough steel town of Fontana. The chapters alternate between internal and external reflections and observations about the events, people, and circumstances shaping the boy’s life and future. Just as with novels such as Angela’s Ashes, Glass Houses, and the author's first published novel The Brothers’ Keepers, the work is a closely detailed analysis of the often negative social and economic forces that affect young peoples’ lives. As a fictional “case study,” Fragments attempts to explore how the circumstances and forces of human institutions, from the family outward, too often serve to drain the critical consciousness of individuals, enslaving them within their own unanalyzed assumptions.

This storyline is developed through an interconnected series of essays and short stories, seventeen in all. These segments alternate between the essay format and the short story form. The essays are written in an introspective style and are richly detailed and evocative for the purpose of allowing the reader to relate to the universals most people experience during the maturation process. The short stories tell of negative incidents in the protagonist’s life that continually draw him into the state of what James Joyce artfully termed “emotional paralysis,” a condition that far too many people allow themselves to be drawn into. With each incident the protagonist progressively relinquishes more and more of his ability of self-determination . . . that is, until he meets his “alchemist.”

As the title intimates, a main theme of the story is the ancient concept of alchemy . . . the search for the chemical substance that can turn lead into gold . . . that can transform the common into the priceless. Certainly the process is a metaphysical fantasy, but the metaphorical image evoked can provide valuable insight into the human experience. Who are the alchemists in our lives and in whose lives are we to be an alchemist? Engendering in people a sense of critical literacy and social responsibility seems to be key to liberating them from the enslaving drug of unquestioning participation in the world in which they exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Paddison
• Release date: Aug 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311211064

John Paddison

John H. Paddison is Professor Emeritus at Central Arizona College. He taught there and at several other colleges and universities after receiving his PhD from the University of Arizona. Paddison’s writing career started with numerous non-fiction publications in the education field and has since branched out to the fiction genre. Upcoming publications include a fictional work entitled "The Grapefruit Burners" and other short stories.

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Fragments of Philosophers' Stone:

Essays and Stories

by John H. Paddison

Copyright 2014 - Paddison Publications. All Rights Reserved.

Published by Paddison Publications at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are rereading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Know this: I, Mercurius, have here set down a full, true and infallible account of the Great Work. But I give you fair warning that unless you seek the true philosophical gold and not the gold of the vulgar, unless you heart is fixed with unbending intent on the true Stone of the Philosophers, unless you are steadfast in your quest, abiding by God’s laws in all faith and humility and eschewing all vanity, conceit, falsehood, intemperance, pride, lust and faint-heartedness, read no farther lest I prove fatal to you. For I am the watery venomous serpent who lies buried at the earth’s centre; I am the fiery dragon who flies through the air. I am the one thing necessary for the whole Opus. I am the spirit of metals, the fire which does not burn, the water which does not wet the hands. If you find the way to slay me you will find the philosophical mercury of the wise, even the White Stone beloved of the Philosophers. If you find the way to raise me up again, you will find the philosophical sulfur, that is, the Red Stone and Elixir of Life. Obey me and I will be your servant; free me and I will be your friend. Enslave me and I am a dangerous enemy; command me and I will make you mad; give me life and you will die.

― Patrick Harpur, Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

Dedication and Acknowledgements

My book is dedicated to the following people, all of whom had their own neighborhoods to negotiate and endure: Toshiko, the prostitute whose parents sold her to the New Paris Bar, down on B.C. Street in Koza, when she was just thirteen; Joe Slinger from South Philly, who got drunk one night and punched out store windows with his angry young fists; Mojica Ramos, who knifed a migrant farmworker in the back, at a bar over in Salinas, and then went AWOL; big Isiah Mitchell from Oakland, a fellow soldier who hated my guts for being white and who nonchalantly tried to strangle me one day; Tommy Omen from Jersey, who drank himself to death at nineteen, down in the barracks one humid, tropical Saturday night.

Additionally, I would need to publically acknowledge the extent to which the genius of Carl Sagan, as expressed in The Demon-Haunted world: Science as a Candle in the Dark, helped me to complete my story. Through him I have come to more deeply understand the speculative powers integral into the scientific method, which demands critical inquiry and vigorous skepticism in searching out and verifying the evidence necessary to support or disprove any given claim or argument, especially those we unquestioningly accept. To shirk from this charge leads to passive subservience to our unanalyzed assumption, and the inevitable consequence, described by Sagan so eloquently in the following summary in his work: The gears of poverty, ignorance, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

I thank my wife Jean for her often strained but ever-present respect for my sometimes distorted worldview. Like the time I asked her if God talked to poor people and she replied, Probably, but their stomachs are growling too loudly for them to hear. I continually try to acknowledge my ever-maturing love for her.

Finally, I remind the reader that just as with all fiction my book is a recreation of the imagined, based on reality . . . a story distilled and synthesized from my own observations and experiences. Any resemblance of the book’s characters, or their actions, to people living or dead is merely a coincidence.

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Table of Contents

Dedication and Acknowledgements

Chapter One Incursions

Chapter Two The Neighborhood

Chapter Three Getting Religion

Chapter Four The Grapefruit Burners

Chapter Five Discipline

Chapter Six The Corner Store

Chapter Seven Gypsies

Chapter Eight The Solitary Pruner

Chapter Nine Initiation

Chapter Ten The Railroad Tracks

Chapter Eleven Intimacies

Chapter Twelve The Progeny

Chapter Thirteen Trespasses

Chapter Fourteen The Lovers

Chapter Fifteen Survival

Chapter Sixteen The Alchemist

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter One -- Incursions

The labor pool in Southern California in the early 1950s proved to be limited, so in order to draw an adequate work force for its massive operation, Permian Industries, the largest steel producing facility west of the Mississippi, constructed tracts of company houses and provided them to its common laborers at very low rent. To make the offer even more inviting, after an employee and his family had lived in one of the homes for a year, he could lease the home for two more years and afterwards could purchase it from Permian at a low cost. The plan played out well over the years and Permian never lacked for workers as many other large industries did during that era of growth.

The sprawling housing projects were located near the factory, out on the west side of the small city of Fortuna, about a mile from and within view of the mountainous gray-black slag heap where railroad cars, running non-stop, dumped the dross that came from the mill’s crucibles. The houses’ weed-specked yards were small and barren, with no boundary fencing allowed. What remained most striking about the Company tract homes, however, was the uniform sense of dreary sameness, which perhaps symbolized the lives of those who lived there. And all the while, the mill’s smokestacks, towering high above the continuously operating blast furnaces and adjoining coke ovens and tin mill, contributed greatly to the chlorine smelling smog that colored the air a brownish-yellow and covered the neighborhoods and automobiles and surrounding land and buildings with a thin film of coal dust and gritty particulate debris.

In late April of 1951, young Joel Sheppard and his family happily moved into one of these small, closely packed company houses. Mostly because of his World War II combat veteran status, Joel’s father finally obtained a hopefully permanent job with Permian, even though only as a common laborer.

During the previous two years, after the restless, war-haunted father relocated his family from the east to the west coast, times had become progressively harder for the troubled man. Originally bound for Los Angles and a sure job for him in the shipyards of San Pedro, the family became stranded when their car threw a rod just on the outskirts of Fortuna, fifty some miles short of their destination. Before leaving the family home in Millbury, Massachusetts, he had sold all of the family land and belongings to a neighbor to finance the relocation. At first the father had been reluctant to take a check from the man for the $651 in proceeds, but then he reasoned that surely no one would screw a wounded veteran, especially one who have been awarded the Medal of Valor for pulling a pilot from the burning wreckage of an airplane. However, when the father tried to cash the check in order to get out of the desperate situation, the voucher turned out to be no good . . . Insufficient funds, the banker sadly reported as he slowly shook his head. His wife had from the beginning been against the relocation, so when stranded on the edge of the vast Mohave Desert they had traversed just before the car engine blew up, she became quite despondent. Always desperate and continually distressed at his mounting failures, the sometimes suicidal man temporarily worked at and then angrily quit a number of low-paying jobs. Those spontaneous explosions required the Sheppard family to relocate quite frequently, moving from one low-rent, county-operated tenement to another.

Then Joel’s father finally landed the foundry job down on one of the open hearths at Permian Steel and the family became eligible to move into the semi-permanence of a house not far from the mill. The bungalows where the family lived—all painted uniformly soot gray, with dirty white trim—faced out onto Tangelo Way, a narrow paved road with numerous potholes and ruts. Just beyond lay a windbreak row of tall eucalyptus trees and a dirt bank sloping down into a large, fragrant grove of orange trees . . . a relatively peaceful sort of place.

Three months after moving in, on a late June morning, the heat and smog of the Southern California summer had just begun to become oppressive, so Joel wore only a t-shirt, shorts, no socks, and a raggedy pair of black and white sneakers with the laces and tongues flapping as he played in front yard of the house. While his mother hung out the laundry on the umbrella clothesline in the backyard, wooden clothes pins protruding from her wide mouth, Joel built a large earthen dam from the brown dirt of the front yard . . . a volcano-shaped dirt crater, nearly three foot in diameter and about a foot tall. With a good deal of labor he hauled water from the front faucet to the construction site, using a rusty, leaking pail. Sweat streamed from his shock of brown hair and trickled down his pale, round face. As he carried the bucket, he stuck his tongue partially out of the corner of his mouth, no doubt to give him balance, just as his father did when he was hard at work. In the carrying process, a good deal of the cool water slopped over the edge of the pail and spilled down his stomach and his pudgy, white legs, turning his purple shorts dark blue. After the water hauling he sat on the ground by the waterway, floating a fleet of eucalyptus twigs and slender leaves blown over from the nearby windbreak. All the while his shorts became covered with thick, grayish mud. He hoped no one would see him and accuse him of wetting his pants again. But then he just went ahead and relieved himself anyway, without even getting up off the ground, feeling the warmness on his crotch and the inside of his legs. And he just played on happily.

As a result of the family’s frequent moves over the past three years, Joel had been in five different schools for kindergarten and his first full year of formal education. Just before the end of first grade, Mr. Higgins, the principal at Mary B. Lewis Elementary, Joel’s present school, told the boy’s parents bluntly, Your son’s lack of bladder control, no doubt, is a result of the stress of having moved so many times and changing schools so frequently. Principal Higgins further supposed that these circumstances also probably accounted for the youngster’s acting out when, shortly after he enrolling in the school, he slugged pretty little Mary Lou Johnson in the stomach, out on the playground one recess, knocking the wind out of her and causing her to cry quite loudly. As other students chased after him, Joel had hurriedly run away from the schoolyard and was not found until much later in the afternoon, hiding in a janitor closet over in the cafeteria. The principal informed the parents that such behavior would not be tolerated if Joel returned for second grade. Mary B. Lewis, which had been named for one of its dedicated teachers who had been killed while rescuing a student from a fiery car crash on the street in front of the school, had extremely high expectations of its pupils. If incidents of Joel’s misbehavior continued to occur during his initial educational development, Higgins warned the embarrassed parents, Joel would certainly need to be placed in a special classroom.

To shame the boy into stopping the odious habit of wetting himself, to toughen up his marshmallow, creampuff of a son, the father nicknamed him Baby Sally, after the infant in the Fun with Dick and Jane school reading book his son so enjoyed. To reinforce the learning experience, the father called Joel the name continuously every time the boy had an accident. Joel’s older brother Vince, three years his senior, even picked up the chant and joined in helping the father with the corrective measure, hounding the boy until he ran off screaming. Holding his hands tightly to his ears, the child finally found refuge from the harangue in the darkness of the small linen closet in the house’s only bathroom. Only then did the two cease the taunting.

Joel later found a measure of satisfaction when Vince became the focus of the father’s scornful treatment. One afternoon the older boy plopped down heavily on the sagging couch in the living room, only to discover he had inadvertently sat on the old man’s treasured collection of Sons of the Pioneers record albums, breaking every one of the vinyl 78s. The father became livid when he came home from work and found out. After beating Vince soundly with a one-by-two—in fact, breaking it on the back of his young legs—the old man gave him the nickname of Satchel Ass, which he used much more regularly than Vince’s given name.

On that peaceful afternoon, however, with the hazy sun and the warm, smoggy air caressing his young face, none of those far off events remained in Joel’s small memory.

A boy named Freddie Schwartz, who was about the same age as Vince, ambled out of his house two doors up the way and drifted across Tangelo towards the windbreak. Barefoot, skinny, with a tangle of orange-red hair covering his head, and freckles sprinkling his entire face and arms, Freddie kept looking over at Joel . . . kinda givin’ him the bad eye. His white t-shirt made his freckles stand out even more and a nervous tick caused him to keep tossing an errant lock of hair back up onto the top of his forehead. Freddie disappeared into the row of trees, emerging a few minutes later directly across from where Joel worked vigorously to shore up a breach in the wall of his dam.

Hey, kid, you wanna see sompin neat? Come ‘ere!

Joel looked up from his work and spotted Freddie on the edge of the windbreak. See what? he answered hesitantly.

It’s a lizard. Come ‘ere! Quick! He’s gettin’ away!

Joel’s mother had warned him about talking to strangers and about leaving the confines of the front yard. But he reasoned that the boy, being from the neighborhood, could surely not be a stranger. The word lizard stirred his curiosity and the thought of holding the creature’s squirmy body excited him greatly.

Hurry! He’s gettin’ away!

Joel rose up hesitantly, knocked the mud from his bare knees and shins, and proceeded across the street to the windbreak, looking both ways before he crossed the roadway, just as his mother had told him to always do. He glanced back to see if his absence would be noticed by her, but she had finished hanging up the laundry and gone back into the house. As he ventured forth, though, he mistakenly failed to invite his best friend Flossie, whose imaginary, comforting presence accompanied him almost everywhere he went.

There ‘e goes! There ‘e goes! shouted Freddie excitedly and the two joined together in the hunt. The long, narrow tail and the silver gray sides of the lizard could be seen streaking into and through the carpet of leaves and eucalyptus bark covering the ground. The chase went on for several minutes as the reptile skillfully eluded their dirty hands, always darting ahead of them by just a few feet. Hunched over, they moved along the bank and finally worked their way down the embankment that sloped to the edge of the orange grove. The shade from the tall eucalyptuses offered a good deal of seclusion. When the lizard finally eluded them, they stood side by side in the silence for a few moments.

Want some candy?

Sure! Joel responded, liking his newfound friend even more.

Freddie reached into his pocket, pulled out a wax papered lump of butterscotch taffy and handed it to Joel. Joel unwrapped the candy and put it into his mouth, savoring the sweetness and the quietude for several minutes. Then Freddie leaned forward and asked in a subtle whisper, You wanna see sumpin’ else that’s neat?

What? Joel replied. This time his response to the question came a bit more guardedly, but the low tone of the Freddie’s voice intrigued him.

"I’ll show ya but ya can’t tell anyone. Understand? It’s a secret between you and me, okay?

Okay.

Take down yur shorts.

Huh? How come?

Never mind. You’ll see.

I’m scared ta . . . .

Just do it, Freddie said, not in a mean way, but rather just patiently coaxing him along.

For some reason, Joel did as the older, more imposing boy directed him to do, moving slowly . . . not really knowing what was happening or going to happen.

Now bend over.

After doing as he had been told, Joel heard Freddie’s zipper open and the noise of his belt buckle loosening, then felt a moist hand on the small of his back. The silence in the hidden hollow beneath the eucalyptus trees began to become frightening. After a few moments, in the stillness he felt Freddie’s warm, white thigh press up against the back of his leg. He stood frozen in time, not knowing the meaning of the terrible moment, yet unable to resist.

Hey! Vat you two doin’ down dare?!

Both boys’ heads jerked up toward the voice and they immediately saw Freddie’s mother Berta yelling at them from the top of the bank, her fisted hands resting on her large hips.

Nothin’…. We ain’t doin’ nothin’. We uz jus’ goin’ ta the bathroom, replied Freddie hesitantly.

Gid up here! Vight now!

The son zipped up hastily and then stumbled up the incline. When he reached the top the angry woman grabbed his bare arm, her long fingernails digging into his small muscles as she shook him vigorously. You naughty, nasty little boy! Wait until your fader gets home! You’re gonna get da razor strop for dis, dot’s for sure! She then slapped at his freckled face, but Freddie deftly ducked under the swing of her slow, flabby arm. Jerking away, he ran off toward his house.

After fearfully watching the exchange, Joel pulled up his dirty shorts up and struggled up the hill, not really knowing what had just happened or what he had done. When he reached the top of the embankment, the mother shook her rigid finger in his face.

Now don’t you go tellin’ anyvun about dis or I’ll say it vas your fault, you little brat! Ack! Makin’ my little Freddie do such a ting! As she spoke she grabbed his arm, squeezing his flesh tightly, and shook him roughly several times to reinforce the threat.

Joel went home and just as he had been directed said nothing. But later that summer, when Vince had become pals with Freddie, the two taunted Joel with the nickname Baby Sally one sweltering afternoon. Joel became so enraged because Vince had cruelly leaked the family secret that he ran into to his house, grabbed a black-handled paring knife from the metal utensil drawer in the kitchen, and went after the two as they walked away down Tangelo. Running down the street toward them, brandishing the weapon in front of his angry, red face, he screamed raw but childish threats.

I’m gonna stab ya and cut yur guts out! he cried, almost hysterically.

Vince and his new friend merely turned around and just laughed at the boy, then wrenched the weapon from his small hand and pushed him down on the pavement.

Go tell your mommy, little baby.

Yeah, go home and pee your pants, ya little baby! Baby Sally!

As the two sauntered away, Joel sort of curled up in the dirt on the side of the road and sobbed, rubbing his skinned elbow, somehow sensing that would not be the last time he would hear the moniker outside of the home.

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Chapter Two -- The Neighborhood

Maple Street lay submerged in one of the older tracts of Permian houses on the west side of Fortuna, out beyond the city limits, south of Foothill Boulevard and north of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad tracks. Like the many other housing project neighborhoods in that part of town, it was bordered by two main streets: north-south running Maple Street, only one long block, and the through street of Locust Drive off to the west. The other three parallel, elm-lined streets of the enclave—Tangerine, Orchard, and Olive—began at Arrow Highway and ended abruptly at Orange Way. Valencia, no more than a littered alley, intersected and connected all four streets in the middle.

Within the confines of the neighborhood, the original employee settlers kept their yards neat and trimmed, talked to each other, and ignored the vagrant, itinerant families who moved fleetingly in and out of the houses around them, the process of which was driven by and depended greatly upon the rise and fall of the price of steel . . . those families who came and went according to the needs and excesses of the steel industry . . . the shiftless ones, the faceless ones, the powerless ones trudging relentlessly on to obscurity. The more permanent resident workers and their wives talked to each other continually about the happenings at the mill: a layoff loomed on the horizon . . . the dirty Japs (whose asses we whipped in the war, mind you) had begun flooding the market with cheap steel . . . the union was rotten . . . the union was good . . . Ernie Jenkins was smashed by an overhead crane. Augie Subotki, once a real regular guy, received a promotion to foreman, and moved into a two-story house nearer to town; word had it that when he left the union ranks, he became a real management prick and a rabid union buster. Permian, Permian, Permian, however, remained the people’s common denominator . . . both their mantra and their bane.

Gradually, with the erosion of time and the going and coming of people, many of the yards along Maple, as well as the other avenues of the neighborhood, turned to yellow grass, while trees and bushes grew profusely green and unchecked to cover the faded paint of the homes and the dirty window with torn screens hanging awkwardly down from them. Adorning some yards were hulks of gutted cars or trucks, most with the hood up or gone and the engine invariably partially disassembled. In ol’ Grover Slater’s yard a greasy Oldsmobile three-speed manual transmission lay partly submerged in the tall, pale, weeds. A variety of refuse embellished the oil-splotched grass of many of the other homes along the street—cans, trash, jagged bottles, a few rotting tires half filled with stagnant rainwater. These were the premises of the transients . . . the itinerants . . . the shiftless here-today-gone-tomorrow folks; the ones who so provoked the ire of the permanents who had the good fortune to be purchasing their homes, enraging them to speechlessness.

During the cool months of spring and fall the regional weather patterns created an early morning on-shore air flow from the Pacific Ocean—the marine layer that each day filled the inland valley with a heavy fog . . . a chilly haze that pressed close to the ground and left a layer of beaded moisture on everything, especially the cars parked along the streets.

On one such morning the dense fogbank lay on the neighborhood so thick you could barely make out the individual houses