The Life I Had in Mind: (Plus Three)

By August Franza

On a vacation in the Caribbean, Sam Gumbs lives an alternative life in LIZARD ON A WHITE WALL.
Mark Nido, a strange employee, is protected by the supervisor of a company for reasons considered suspicious in THAT MAN.
In THE LIFE I HAD IN MIND, kinds of love and ways of love are revealed in the lives of two friends.
THE VITAL CENTER is a satire about committed, horny, abrasive, and flawed teachers and students in an American high school.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503561465

August Franza

August Franza has published 27 novels and is planning to make them an even 30.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by August Franza.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-6147-2

                eBook          978-1-5035-6146-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 04/15/2015

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CONTENTS

Also by the Author

THE LIFE I HAD IN MIND

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

THAT MAN

LIZARD ON A WHITE WALL

Chapter 1 Starting Out (And In)

Chapter 2 Shark Encounter

Chapter 3 Past Imperfect

Chapter 4 Cabbie

Chapter 5 Touring I

Chapter 6 Touring 2

Chapter 7 End of Touring

Chapter 8 Questions

Chapter 9 Family Mores

Chapter 10 Erotic Plans

Chapter 11 Transit

Chapter 12 Dialogicon

Chapter 13 Feet in Marmalade

Chapter 14 The Apparition

Chapter 15 Search (Me)

Chapter 16 Home Run

Chapter 17 Raven

Chapter 18 The Apparition

Chapter 19 Haunted

Chapter 20 A Handshake

Chapter 21 Not Alone

Chapter 22 Not Alone

Chapter 23 Ascent/Descent

Chapter 24 XXIV

Chapter 25 The Apparition

Chapter 26 All This

Chapter 27 All Over

Chapter 28 Into The Long Road Home

Chapter 29 Apparition

THE VITAL CENTER

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1 KRALK

Chapter 2 MAMMIN

Chapter 3 MELON

Chapter 4 PRIBBLE

Chapter 5 RAY

Chapter 6 MAMMIN

Chapter 7 BRASCO

Chapter 8 RAY

Chapter 9 BRASCO

Chapter 10 MELON

Chapter 11 KRALK

Chapter 12 BRASCO

Chapter 13 LUNCH

Chapter 14 RAY

Chapter 15 BRASCO

Chapter 16 ALL

Chapter 17 WHEELS

EPILOGUE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

The Murder of Hitler

The Events at Vista Bay

If I Die Before I Live

Bloodstream

American Ecstasy: a trilogy (an environmentally poisoned eagle’s retelling of American History)

His Father’s Son

A Dual Novel (The Elephant’s Sense of Smell/For Reasons Unknown)

How Shall I Put This? (short stories)

The Kierkegaard Novel

Four Short Novels (The Navigators/Pulling a Gauguin/Birds of a Feather/Condomania)

The Grand Highway

America Arriba! (Don Quijote & Sancho Panza in the 20th Century)

The Skin Game

A Flea’s Notebook

Arrows of Longing (plays and filmscripts)

Half-Finished Heaven (a memoir/novel)

The Cradle Was Green (editor)

THE LIFE I HAD IN MIND

ONE

Eddie Saucefleem says it’s hopeless. I have to listen to Eddie. (You may know who he is.) He’s been saying it’s hopeless for twenty-five years, first in person and now through the mail. I get a letter from Eddie every month or so and it’s always the same thing. Dark, dark, and very dark. But funny. Eddie’s funny while succumbing to depression. I love the guy for a million reasons. He says I should look up the word ‘menippean’ and check the derivation of ‘liberation’ if I want to know what it’s all about. He says people himself included are stuffed with delusions and reality is in shambles except for his famous ex-collaborator, Alvin Postcard. Eddie says there’s nothing to be done about the condition of things; it’s all over, it’s been over.

"Dear Vito,

I now have pneumonia because I needed it. Four house moves in fourteen months was/is too much. I’m back in the swamp doing penance for sins I never committed.

Ole’, Eddie

P.S. -- 11th century inscription on an Italian church: Your dragging of stones is well deserved. Pull, you villains!

Typical Eddie Saucefleem letter. I’ve saved thirty or so. I’m saving them for The Archives. (Let’s see: Eddie is five; Saucefleem is ten; that’s fifteen. A very bad number. Can’t do anything with the number fifteen.)

Once in a while Eddie mentions Alvin Postcard (he’s thirteen, another bad number) but I don’t comment. I have too few friends to lose Eddie but he’s got a big blind spot when it comes to Alvin Postcard, the most famous media analyst since Marshall McLuhan, except that he’s a sniveling turncoat where McLuhan is always re-Joyceing. Eddie should be the famous media analyst but he copped out for reasons I never learned. Eddie never told me but I could guess. He had a chance and blew it. My chances never came. Yet. So I really don’t buy Eddie’s Beckettesque view of the world. Not completely, anyway. I buy Eddie, though.

He moved a lot when he was a kid, he wrote, for economic reasons meaning they couldn’t pay the rent. So he ended up going to a bunch of public and parochial schools, about eleven of them, by the time he got to fifth grade. Prior to the school where he got exorcised (yes, Eddie was Catholic and never got over it though he tried and tried) he went to a Catholic school in Brooklyn which he made notorious. In class the nun whose name he never knew made him sit at the front of one row where there was just a seat and no desk. Eddie didn’t like that. One day as the class was marching (of course) out of the room Eddie picked a wicker waste basket and dropped it over the nun’s head. She got angry. Eddie was hurriedly passed along to another Catholic school where he got so bored with Friday benedictions he invented a game to pass the time during the ritual. The game consisted of a farting contest with the winner decided by the number of echoes the farts produced down the nave of the church. Eddie and his followers got away without punishment. Even though the nuns could smell what was going on they just couldn’t bring themselves to even hiss between their teeth You boys, stop farting this instant! Eddie knew that the Church and its retainers could never deal with natural human functions. Those had to be hidden. If you want to go to the bathroom in a Catholic Church you have to descend to the bowels of the building to find the shithouse.

Oddly enough in a new school Eddie was chosen to be one of the Chosen, an altar boy because he looked ‘angelic’. They had told him that in other schools but he ignored it. Not here though. Here he was special. But problems developed even while he was memorizing the Latin responses to give at mass. The priests were Augustinians who Eddie said bore no relationship to St. Augustine. They were German and really dumb. He learned the Latin responses but he didn’t know what he was saying so he asked. He was clouted on the side of his head and told that he didn’t need to know what he was saying as long as he said it right. Eddie didn’t like that. He wanted to know things. At a wedding or funeral mass the priest would bang the chalice against the cruet for more holy wine. Eddie would get it and at the end of the services with the priest running out to attend the festivities Eddie had the job of cleaning up putting the wine back in the cupboard and restoring the scared garments to the scared closet.

But Eddie saw his chance and drank what remained in the bottle of vino. Slightly Smashed he had a drunken collision with a three foot statue of the Virgin Mary.

When it hit the floor Jesus’ Virgin Mother broke into many small pieces. Then in what he said was his first out-of-body mode he delivered to a nun an ex-tempore sermonette on idolatry finishing up by picking up a piece of the Virgin and writing on a blackboard in letters at least a foot high the word SHIT. His mother was called to the school immediately but she didn’t go. She was afraid of nuns. She had learned to avoid them as a consequence of having spent eight years in a Catholic orphanage. She loved the Church but hated all priests and nuns, an attitude not uncommon among the Irish. The upshot of all of his demonic behavior was that he was brought to the rectory that night in order to be exorcised. Eddie was not impressed by the ritual which consisted of a fat priest reading out of an exorcism manual while another fat priest swung a censure that was smoking enough to call the fire department. The exorcism didn’t work because Eddie did not believe in demons. When they let him go it was of course deep night. In front of the rectory was a car the priests used for emergencies and for taking the gear for the last rites to those lucky enough to be leaving this vast vale of tears. Next to the car was a flagpole. His next out-of- body experience was this: I unloosened the lanyard that was tied around the flagpole and wound it around the rear bumper of the car. The rest Eddie only heard about since he was herded to the next school. When some priest drove off on a mission of mercy the car stalled and when he hit the gas, the flagpole bent, denting the roof of the car. It was my point, Eddie said, to make the point that there was no point to exorcism.

Eddie’s number (fifteen) and Alvin’s number (thirteen) are not good. They bode ill.

A letter from Eddie with questions:

Vito, Something is happening and I don’t know what it is. Do you have a copy of what you sent me? I think I ate it. What do you hear from the 1st Century? When you go to a baseball game, how many hotdogs do you eat? Do you know what’s in ’em? Have you heard from X? What do you want for Xmas? Can Norman Vincent Peale help Samuel Beckett? Is Rose Franzblau really Toots Shor in drag? How can we find true hah-hah-happiness?

Ole’, Eddie

One of the first things I wanted to know about Eddie was his crazy name.

Saucefleem. When he fought in the war where he was badly hurt, he checked around because he knew he was part Belgian and part Dutch. It was in an extremely wacky corner of Europe. Saucefleem, he found out, may be a corrupted version of ‘Sauer’, a river, and Fleming the people of Flanders. Some clerk probably fouled up a form when his grandfather came over. Eddie didn’t dig any further because that was bad enough.

I always write back to Eddie but I was usually stymied by what he told me.

I’d end up writing about myself and my name. Eddie wrote about himself and I wrote about myself. A beautiful friendship.

TWO

And me? I’m Vito Nuova (Nine. That’s perfect) Aka Harry Covaire (Twelve. I can work with that), Dom DePlume (Ten. Pretty good). Pierre Gezunt (Twelve. Ditto). But nothing’s like a nine or a seven.

Nine. Three threes. The Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nine: The human Sexual Triads, man’s and woman’s. Three threes equals nine.

Dante’s Commedia: three parts equal nine; Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, written in Terza (Three) Rima…..Then there are The Three Graces: Faith, Hope, and Charity; The Nine Muses, three times three; the world, the flesh and the Devil, three enemies of man; the kingdom of nature, mineral, vegetable, animal; Fates, Furies, Greek Rulers: all threes.

I’m not Vito Nuova for nothing. That’s what my mother told me. She insisted upon it. You’re not Vito Nuova for nothing. And she knew it with numbers, which she considered magical. Numbers set up frequencies and frequencies affected Being, your being, my being. I loved my mother. She was a sweetheart, all good, and with numbers, she made life better. Nobody could argue with her. She had the magic. I didn’t buy it but I loved her so I do the numbers.

When you think that The Odyssey (ten) the greatest book ever written before Joyce’s Ulysses, seven letters also twenty-four books you have the magic three into twenty-four = seven! That’s perfect. Seven’s my lucky number. Always has been. Always will be. Which means they are going to take it. This time….…this time….Yes. All I have to do is wait, which I’m brilliant at. My greatest accomplishment. I am the World’s Greatest Waiter! It won’t be by letter. I’ve learned nothing important comes through the mail. It’ll be by Phone. Just a little more waiting then the call…

I’ll tell Eddie first. First and Foremost. And the rest of them. How do you squeeze the dream of your life in a few sentences, the revelation in a sentence?

They’ll tell me things like It’s about time, you sonuvabitch! See, I told you, you hump! Jesus, I was sure it was gonna be posthumous! I JUST KNEW IT WOULD HAPPEN, YOU PUTZ! SCHMUCK, LET’S HAVE A PARTY! I’ll ask Eddie How do I fill up when I’ve been empty so long? You can get sick when the body’s not used to health. Like new, exotic foods that won’t go down. Like something cold when you’re hot and your throat swells up and you get a wracking pain. Like any food when you’re malnourished and you throw it up even though your body is desperate for it. I’ll certainly call my parents. My dear dead parents. They did something for me and what was it? A Great Unkillable Urge! I don’t know how they did it. Maybe it was perfect pure love, a YOU-CAN-DO-IT love. I haven’t done it but I can handle the waiting. But now as it ends what will I do? Keel over? Go the psychosomatic way? Finally get into drugs and drinking? Get Writers Block? When you wait thirty years for Something have you waited too long?

THREE

I just re-read what I wrote and saw the mistake. Three does not go into twenty-four seven times. The number is not seven but eight! Eight! What can I do with an eight? Turn it on its side and get infinity. What good is Infinity to me?

Slice in half and you get two zeros? Useless. Eddie would laugh and say I told you so.

Whoa! Slow down Eddie. Let me ponder Sevens. The Seven Days of Creation, The Seven Ages of Man, The Seven Against Thebes, The Seven Wise Masters, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, The Seventh Day Adventists, The Seven Wonders of the World, The Seven Deadly Sins, The Seven Sacraments, The Seven Planets, The Seven Virtues, The Seven Years’ War, The Seven Cardinal Virtues, The Seven Ups, The Seven Sorrows of Mary, Seven-Eleven Stores……

I’m in. Not only that I add up my birthday, month, and year and I get Sevens. Caramba! (seven letters.)

This is what writing does to you. Eddie succumbed. Not me.

*

Another thing about Eddie. He thinks – no, he’s sure and certain– that he is being poisoned by America’s sinkhole: the food we’re given to eat that is dreamed up by the Agribusiness. Yes, forced to eat by chemicals put in food that no matter what efforts Americans make, if they make them, no matter how many times they’re told that bacon is a weapon of mass destruction, no matter how many times the layers of FSS (fat, salt and sugar) are shoved down their throats they scarf it down anyway. They’re slaves to it. There is shit in the meat, there is a tun of suppressed info by the Agribusiness, there are cattle that are fed dead animals. "It all goes back to Upton Sinclair’s expose’ of the meat business in The Jungle and it never ends. That was 1906 and what’s changed?"

Eddie ate at MacDonald’s once, ONCE mind you, and he got such an attack of acid reflux and heart burn that the only good thing about it was he got to remember that he had a heart.

FOUR

This is what writing does to you. You’re like a Starving Armenian, a man without any hope of sex, a body shorn of sleep, a rotting tooth, a rat in a blocked hole without food and these mean fucking-hungry cats surround the exit ready to pounce. Of course all this is covered up with manners and civility. Everything is covered up. That’s the lesson of living. I meet an acquaintance, a neighbor down the street, Norman Nabelshau and he really gets into talking about his gas- guzzling car, his execrable taxes, the thieving heating company. There is real passion here. I listen with my counterfeit life, my counterfeit mind, my counterfeit personality. Then he says I wish I had a hobby like you do and could forget all about this. A hobby? He’s referring to my self-imposed, well-tolerated thirty-year jail term. There’s no point in correcting him or killing him. What does he know?

Hobby! I just walk away muttering to myself that’s it’s all in the eye of the asshole. But my feelings are shredded. One word. That’s all it takes to shred them.

One misplaced ill-chosen two-syllabled word, an expelled breath and a coming together of lips saying hah-bee. If he cared to listen I could tell him about my hah- bee. I would make him weep.

Another guy on the block Wright Lane has a different approach. He disapproves of my hah-bee. "Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

That’s no good. You can be very disappointed. What I do is set myself a new project every couple of years. I get into it but not so deep that I’ll never get out.

That’s dangerous. Look at you. How many rejections do you have? Don’t you realize what they’re telling you? You don’t have the right product. Get the right product or get a new hah-bee."

Norm and Wright. They don’t know. Nobody knows. I hang you out to dry with clothes pins around your necks. Norm has read two novels in his life. He tells me that right out. A Stone for Harry Fisher. Yeah Norm you can’t even get the title straight. And he simply can’t remember the title of the other book. That takes care of Norman Nabelshau.

Wright Lane is a more complex case. Wright Lane is a reader, a smart guy but it’s all science and technology. He hasn’t got time for novels any novel which D.H. Lawrence called the bright book of life. Amen Lorenzo. Why did he say that?

Because the novel is man-alive, if it’s only a tremulation on the ether, it can make the whole man-alive tremble which is more than poetry philosophy science or any other technical book can do. That’s my man. D.H. Lawrence.

Novels aren’t real Wright Lane says. That’s right Wright they’re more than real. Nabelshau and Lane are the kind of people I have to deal with. I bet they fuck their wives with their socks on.

Here’s an episode. The most highly touted New York paper ran another of their catch-22 articles about publishing. This one was about first novels. It said that first novels were desirable because they and their authors were new and new was exciting. The only trouble is new novels don’t sell so publishers are afraid because they’re taking a big gamble. But first novel are new and exciting. They want them. But they’re so risky. A gamble for highly touted New York publishers?

I’ll tell you about gambling. They’re only gambling with money. I’m gambling with my life, buddy.

The article quoted four editors on the subject of first novels. I copied down their names and wrote each a letter. Leslie Grutiger (fourteen letters; two sevens; not bad; very good, in fact) responded saying she was intrigued with the creative idea and subject matter of my first novel. Actually it was my fifteenth but since they’re all unpublished which ever one gets published first will be my ‘first’.

Would I please send her a copy so that she and Roger Carroll (12 letters barely make it) her boss and senior editor of Tumescent House (fourteen letters, two sevens) can read it. Then while I was speeding along cleaning up the ms. another letter came from Arnold Westbourne (sixteen letters, bad vibes) of Peristalsis Press (sixteen again. Boo). He too was intrigued and fascinated and bowled over. Would I send it along as long as it’s not over three hundred pages.

I love these guys with their fucking provisos and their off-hand affectless language. Send it along? Leslie! Roger! Arnold! You don’t know who you’re talking to. I’ll ram it down the barrel of a sixteen inch gun on a battleship moored in L.I. Sound and blast it to you. Send it along. What do you think I’m sending you? A ham sandwich? Such euphemisms may protect you but they enrage me. This is my star-struck life you’re fucking with!

FIVE

What can you do when you’re a mere writer who digs a happy hole for himself with his narcissistic ambition and thrives in it.

You are one of the most vulnerable people on earth when you are a writer. You are giving yourself up surrendering defenses revealing your very being from brain pan to asshole to which the world says Ho-Hum. The Roger Carrolls the Leslie Grutigers the Arnold Westbournes in their nice civilized detached ways which they are so good at tell you in grand euphemisms to fuck off and you’re left (again) holding your bag of goods which you have slaved over in your happy hole for X years. But not anymore. Leslie Roger and Arnold are interested intrigued fascinated. You’re on Go, not Hold or Dump. I gave them To Bed at Noon (eleven letters, possibilities). Author Vito Nuova. (Nine letters, magnifico!)

I believe in honesty and forthrightness but there are limits. I was going to leave out the following too sad to admit to in print because…..well here it is:

An agent called. Not a letter but a phone call. Hurrah! Hugh Trillibight (a bad number 15 I admit) made a connection with the novel I sent him. I think it was Nocturne. He recognized the inventiveness and the style of it He appreciated them deeply. Of that novel (if that was the novel. Maybe it was Cape Nothing) he said You have written an accurate and moving novel which does what a novel ought to do. You have explained a rarely illumined part of the human condition. Wow. Not a loud, raucous, wall-beating wow, but a soft, internal, languid wow. I felt quietly fulfilled justified complete. Consummatum est! Only a writer knows that feeling. It isn’t like sex and love wherein two people connect over the same feeling. No. You have mastered an important reader with your creation. Your prose has convinced the reader to allow himself be mastered. How many ways can I put it? Success! Mastery! It’s domination goddammit!

Hugh and I had three long conversations (his nickel). He was based in the Twin Cities and suddenly I knew all about him. He was a frog-throated sixty-five years old professional agent who had been an agent for thirty-five years half of it in England. England sounded fine in my ears. He wrote a monthly agent’s column for a hot magazine for agents. I forced myself to be impressed. He even sent me a couple of issues. His tone was ironic funny a little world-weary like Eddie’s. He said he had a lot of Weltschmerz. (I had to look it up.) He told me it would take at least a month to respond since he was waiting for two readers’ reports. (Not one but two!) He gave me support by quoting a writer who said the novel is an event; it is one of those recognitions of life by which life itself becomes the greater. I say that, Vito, because that’s what your book does for me. That made me drool. But a month and a half went by and no response. So I sent him a card. "Will the sun rise on Nocturne?" or something stupid like that. I couldn’t help myself. I continued to wait feeling like a wet blanket. And then another month until the readers’ reports came in and the word was Go! He started to push the book and he wanted to see more which I sent.

And then and then and then not months after reading my books and giving me his loving evaluation he writes me that his wife died in a car crash. I sent condolences but my vicious heart felt nothing. What about the fucking book???

How crude a hungry narcissistic writer can get. That’s Vito Nuova I’m talking about, a decent enough guy when he’s off the pen.

I assumed there would be more delays and there were. There were. Then the final blow came. What does the son of a bitch go and do on me? He commits suicide! (I knew his number (15) wasn’t a good sign.) In a letter, his step-son said, My father was deeply shaken by his wife’s death. It followed barely a year from another death. I’ll be returning your manuscripts. My God does it take a suicidal personality to appreciate what I write? Did the poor bastard take the pipe as a result of reading me?

*

How did this obsession possess me? How did I come to regard writing and getting published as all-important critical crucial imperative? I think I’m aware of reality. I’m not blind to the real existence of things and of others. I know about Polandia, Germania, Spainola, Francoland, Italeria, the Emirates of Moham, Russland, Khayyamdom, the backwaters of Chine, the U.S. A. of Mortal Combat. I myself have survived the Thirty Years War (Hanoia, Saigona, Quba, Panajama, Racky, Istan) in these States of Mortal Combat. I have medals (self-awarded). I have wounds almost like Eddie Saucefleem. Why do some guys get all the wounds and turncoats like Alvin Postcard (13, uh-uh) get all the glory? There’s a ripping story of injustice there but just hang on and I’ll fill in some details.

Ah yes. My Great Unkillable Urge. Even Hemingway’s suicide couldn’t warn me about the perils of my profession. John Berryman ditto and Sylvia Plath Dorothy Parker E.A. Poe Jack London Hart Crane Richard Brautigan Jerzy Kosinski William Inge and on and on and don’t forget Sinclair Lewis and impetigo and the endless lists of alcoholics Faulkner Williams Kerouac Chandler O. Henry Dylan Thomas Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald Elizabeth Bishop John Cheever.

Why go on? Perilous profession. Who’s escaped? Must I join them?

I predicted I’d be a published novelist by the age of twenty-seven. Why twenty-seven? Well, three times nine (look at all those trinities and Dante references) equals twenty-Seven and two plus seven is NINE. Dante numbers. Did Dante have a career? Did Dante make it alive? Did Dante smack home runs? Is he The Babe Ruth of Literature! The first was the greatest. The next two tough on Moderns. But he wrote them in exile which I know about.

So that was my plan and the thing to do was keep myself alive and well until twenty-seven. It was not easy. I made the foolish mistake of getting married which didn’t turn out very well and then I made my second foolish mistake of becoming a teacher. I was neutral about it but I needed the bread. I’m not completely sure why I committed those two blunders except to say the obvious: gonad needs and security needs. I figured (did I?) that if I taught I’d have summers off for writing and if I got married I wouldn’t have to go hunting for sex. That would clear the decks to think about one thing – you guessed it. Could I have known it would become my bete-noir?

Unlike Eddie’s marriage to Bones (that was her name), mine turned out worse. By comparison. Liz was a very patient woman. I really got to love her because she was smart, honest, frank, and at times funny. How funny? Let me share the contents of a book she wrote to me early in our marriage. It’s called The Fall of the House of Nuova, by Frustrated Wife. It even has an introduction that says "This book was written to attract the attention of a certain person I know who only takes heed of things in print.

Chapter 1: Bugs! Lots of Bugs! Dead! Down the cellar!

Chapter 2: Geraniums! Lots of Geraniums! Dead! In the window box!

Chapter 3: Insurance! Car Insurance! Expired! On Vito’s desk!

Chapter 4: Ants! Lots of ants! Came to eat the Bugs! Dead, Down the Cellar!

Chapter 5: Ants! Lots of Ants! Came up to the House to Feast!

Chapter 6: Wife buys Raid. Puts it on Desk!

Chapter 7: BOOM!!!!

Chapter 8: House falls!

Chapter 9: Dead Bugs! Dead Ants! Dead Geraniums! They rise up and take over.

Chapter 10: Vito happy! Only thing to do is Read!

Chapter 11: In tiny, ugly furnished room, landlord take care of everything!

Chapter 12: Dead Ants! Bugs! Geraniums! Expired Insurance! Come to tiny, ugly apartment to hunt Vito! They take his books!

Chapter 13: Vito finally acts!!!!!!!"

That was the funny part but it wasn’t long before the bad part emerged and I can’t blame her because she realized that she had to play second fiddle to my writing. Being the wife of a teacher was bad enough but add to that my obsession with writing and publishing and it was adios hombre! I couldn’t blame her. We both knew I couldn’t and wouldn’t so I failed to change. Too bad my teaching career didn’t have as many laughs as Liz’s book. Speaking of laughs, a letter from Eddie.

Dear Vito,

My daughter Jean had to make us grandparents recently. Of course, she’s not married. Just what we needed. If i could think of something funny to write, i would. i miss laughing. i used to laugh a lot. (When was that?) Now i mutter. Being sane is a terrible burden. Do something good for yourself.

Ole’, Eddie

SIX

Now come the sex parts. Really The Sex Parts. I thought about putting them in. Yes…. No…. Why not? I’m not going to show off. I’ll be fairly objective.

Sex is not writing. Writing is not sex. They have different vibes but both have consequences.

Eddie’s wife is Bones as I’ve said. That gives you a whiff of it. She’s really a mother to him so Eddie went elsewhere of sex. And where else? The student body. What student body? Eddie’s college’s student body or should I say the college that Eddie worked for, Paint and Varnishes College. He knew he shouldn’t but as you know now he had a very negative Catholic upbringing.

He was a punk of a kid causing mayhem, a stoned altar boy combatting nasty nuns while trying to rid himself of a perilous demanding Jesus Christ as proposed by a Catholic Church in a state of siege. (More about that later.) It was all wrong and Eddie knew it and the guilt that followed. It filled him even though he stomped on it and smothered it and tried very desperately to obliterate it. To no avail. Of course. Like the Church always says, Give us the child for the first seven years and you can have what remains. We go deep. And yet after all that sin and guilt never stopped Eddie. Sin and guilt just paralyzed him.

By the way Paint and Varnishes College (PVC) was a conjoining of wealthy donors, one a local boy who made good in hardware and the other an Italian immigrant in cement. I think the hardware donor won a bet.

PVC was a beautiful place with all the trappings and cosmetics of an old-fashioned college. Eddie nearly ruined the place’s rep but not quite. He knew a threat when one lands like a strong shoulder tap. Until then, Eddie had the run of the place more or less sexually. I’ve never described Eddie physically so let me.

You know about his mental states but physically he was the bee’s knees. He was tall (not too) strong (very) and handsome (quite) with a glorious head of slightly graying hair (ever so slight). You can envision the rest of him. A mensch. You must know about sex in college. It’s right up there with basket weaving and football.

But there is an enormous difference between sex in college and sex in high school. The former is get what you can (or want). The latter is a total no-no.

Absolute. You get caught in high school and you pay the price. We’re always reading about teachers who get caught. I taught in high school but I didn’t get caught. Taking advantage of children. What a crime! What a scandal! What a furor! But in college, they’re basically still children, too —seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—aren’t they? The only difference is the ‘children’ are away from home.

Sometimes far away.

I found out later that Eddie always felt guilty about having sex with students but it never stopped him because as you have seen he thinks that life is absurd, completely and totally absurd. Eddie long ago declared war on his church and he won but what did he get? Paralysis. At least as far down as his stomach and bowels. Of course his head. Eddie never talked about his sex forays in his letters but if he did it would probably go something like this.

"I’ll probably get syphilis like many writers and artists and half the French literary establishment. French pox. You ain’t kiddin’!"

Speaking of the absurd I guess I’ll have to tell you how I knew about Eddie’s sexual forays since he never told me or gave me even the slightest mention of them in his letters. Therein lies a tale.

But first about me.

SEVEN

After all my rah-rah I am more than just a writer. I’ve as much rancor at the as Eddie. We do nothing about it. ‘Absurd’ is my middle name. Talk to me and I flash that word every couple of sentences. It’s my insecurity blanket. I’ve read about it and I’ve thought about it and I agree I’m living in a discontinuous universe loaded with lack of cohesion, coherence and credibility. I’ve read Sartre and Camus. I’ve been to the theater of the absurd and got reinforced there. I’ve written absurd plays myself (comes natural). I read a literary critic/psychologist who analyzed the absurd. He said yes the world is absurd and it causes us profound anxiety but so what? We still have to live.

Which brings me to Gabrielle (nine letter. Perfect! Wunderbar!). Ah, Gabrielle. Known as Gabby but not by me! And we kept our mouths shut. She was always Gabrielle and always will be. Do you believe me when I tell you that she came after me. Yes, I had noticed her beauty. I was deeply aware of it. But I also knew this was a high school I was teaching in not Eddie’s Paint and Varnishes College and