The Golden Stairs

By John Michael Flynn

In The Golden Stairs, John Michael Flynn's second book of essays, the focus is on the quirky, the common, and the sublime. Through the personal, he examines universal themes, writing of passions and victories as well as losses and disappointments.

 

These are the essays as they appear in the collection:

 

Gentian

A Spark Must Jump Its Gap

The Wandering Gene

Talking The Notion Of Satisfaction

Answers For My Noses And Neuroses

The Perch, The Tube

Two Ways To Enter A Classroom

Without Papers

Salvador Mulligatawny, Or What Is A Poem?

With A Calendar In Fading Light I Remember Amiri Baraka

Imperfection

Kin, Friend, Mentor

Dances With The Imagined

Radio Days: Me And My Dad In The Theatre Of The Mind

Aloft Somewhere Beyond Comprehension

Chase Scenes

Living Between The Leaves

One Face From Corner To Corner A Decahedron

Some Say It Didn't Happen

Leap Into The Sun

Starting From Normal

 

Some of these essays appeared in slightly different form and under the name Basil Rosa in the following publications.

 

1. "Without Papers," and "Radio Days" in Redwood Coast Review

2. "Imperfection" in Anti-Heroin Chic"

3. "Leap Into The Sun" in the anthology Beyond The Plots

4. "The Perch, The Tube" in Spank The Carp

5. "Living Between The Leaves" in the anthology Being Home

6. "The Wandering Gene" was presented as an address to The History Club at Watford Grammar School For Boys. 

7. "Gentian" and "Chase Scenes" and "Aloft Somewhere Beyond Comprehension" in The Argyle

8. "Starting From Normal" in Masque & Spectacle

9. "With A Calendar In Fading Light I Remember Amiri Baraka" in Juste Literary

10. "Dances With The Imagined" in Hedge Apple

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flight Delay Books
• Release date: Jan 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224108725

John Michael Flynn

John Michael Flynn also writes novels as Basil Rosa. He's published three collections of short stories, one with Publerati, and another with Fomite, and a book of essays with New Meridian Arts. He's taught at schools, colleges and university in the United States, Moldova, Turkey and Russia. To quote the poet Forrest Gander, "his poems are not absurdly modern but take the risk of articulating a serious moral gaze." 

Book preview

Gentian

It’s a day

when I believe everything important happens far, far away from where I stand. Two of my brothers, Mark and Steven and me, are shoveling our driveway yet again. We breathe, we work with such vigor. When I pause, I look up to the sky and see it washed metallic and bright and empty of clouds and I think of it as the boldest most memorable sky I’ve ever seen. I can also see and smell the ripples of heat radiating from the roof of our iced-up house with its eaves toothed with icicles and I remember that Mother is in the kitchen baking two loaves of her date-nut bread. One for us boys and one to sell at an annual church fundraiser. Later in our socks and pajamas we’ll sup greedily on canned tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and then we’ll each devour a wedge of cake covered in cream cheese. Father will come home after dark to find his driveway clear and we’ll go to bed early to sleep in contentment and exhaustion. 

It’s a night

when what returns before sleep is a memory of an Easter when it snowed a while and later after our family meal in my brother Joe’s house in Sutton sunshine came on and the sky was that unique cloudless presence again, but at that time in my life it seemed chintzy somehow, not natural and less than what I remembered it as. It drove me to realize there is no single moment when we happen.

I began

at age ten to run each morning, whipping through the woods on my way to school and imagining myself an Algonquin brave. The birds began to talk to me. I talked back, but I didn’t always listen. On rainy days after school I lay stomach on floor and read until sleepy from a new Highlights, or a Boy’s Life each month, or dog and wilderness survival stories, or a Hardy Boys novel. On sunny days, having some marbles and an arrowhead and a jackknife meant everything. Some of my marbles were as clear as that sky and these I never traded but kept separately in a little tin that once held shoe polish.

I leaned

at age eleven into his long silences buffed waxed and shining with admiration. Every fall I raked his lawn at least twice. He never paid me, nor did I expect it, but he’d give me a stamp now and then or wheat pennies, the rarer ones minted in San Francisco and Denver. We boys, my brothers and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood would walk down the street with him and feel safe because he was so big and older and we feared and idolized him. He did all the talking mostly about PT boats and how fierce and honorable the Japanese fighters were in a place he called the Pacific Theatre and how they deserved our respect. How respect meant everything in this world.

Then one day

he just wasn’t around and my father had to explain that he’d left us for a better place and wouldn’t be coming back and that I should bring a plate of Mom’s home-baked cookies to his wife and just sit with her for a while. That plate was made of a glass that equaled the color and clarity of those skies I remembered.

I brought it to her and we sat and ate cookies and drank hot chocolate and she washed the plate afterwards and I took it back to my mother. I didn’t tell anyone that I didn’t understand any of this. Nor did I know that such a color could have its own name.

A Spark Must Jump Its Gap

If any rumor of the world states it’s mine I dismiss it because it’s usually part of a nightmare which I keep it to myself. What’s funny and at the same time pathetic and a source of revengeful glees is this picture I have of one of the slick criminals, a heroin dealer I ran with for a while who often looked so natty in a suit and silk tie. He was up north in Canada expanding his operation, a whore at his side, but he couldn’t handle the sting in his knuckles when snow slanted down across the road in front of him forcing him to grip his steering wheel tighter in a futile effort to keep his car from fish-tailing out of control into a guardrail.

Along came the Mounties, maybe on horseback, to save his sorry hide. When they learned of his so-called identity and lifestyle, they locked him up. He’s still behind bars. I never really liked him. He screwed me out of a lot of money, but I was a sucker and that’s how it goes when you’re using hard drugs.

We met in LA and only an arrogant blowhard would tag The City of Angels with a monolithic label, but I’m nothing if not arrogant so let me give this six-burbs-seeking-a-metro a shot at surreal definition. I’ll start with its paleoclimatology, its basal zones both geodetic and paleo-seismic, its nonlinear resonance, its plate tectonics in motion, its mid-latitude littoral industrial slurbs, its floodplain squats, housing tracts, wildfire corridors, stucco slapdash bodegas pebbled on corners slipshod over drylands once wet, its pre-cast concrete super-cubes, its flown-in palm trees in technicolor, its moralizing angels and demonizing tribes, its youth feral and soon to be stars, its car-jackers, paramilitaries, pet-loving ecologists, cougars, and gay pin-up wannabes of West Hollywood working as yoga instructors in spandex.

David Rieff calls it Capital Of The Third World, its glow so bright, da bomb as some kids might say, on auto surf as it rises and falls, its tides informing the barrios and hustle angles and big-screen renditions and perpetual slumming. Its FMPs, meaning fuck me please pumps for the hookers marching in a phalanx, the dealers of smack, of lies, of fentanyl, the cardboard cities, the jacaranda blossoms in late May peaking just a few days before Memorial Day. Lilacs already in bloom. Yucca starting to show color though not yet there. The bougainvillea (white, pink, deep red), and magnolias, too, blooming. Oleander always it seems everywhere. Can’t eat those poisonous leaves.

Mexicans don’t fear anyone and they fight with the Armenians. Salvadorans with Nicaraguans. Blacks with Koreans. Blacks with blacks. Whites fearing everybody. Some say city fathers were happy most of the liquor stores got wiped out after the riots during the Reagan era because Koreans swept in along Olympic and took over. I say no experiment is ever perfect, and certainly not monolithic, but don’t listen to me I’m arrogant. I think to survive in cities you need to be a little bent and little more than off. Sic transit Gloria. Criminals thriving among rats.

One day I met this chicana que linda on the bus riding Wilshire home to Norton and she told me she worked at Subway, so one afternoon when I had the time I walked there to meet her. When I saw her, I didn’t recognize her because her shiny black hair was down when I’d met her on the bus and behind the Subway counter she was wearing it up and trapped within a net. I’d arrived in a sour mood just because the city, any city, keeps me sour, but I was ready to ask this girl out. When she finally recognized me I smiled and said hello, but she gave me the cold shoulder as if fed up because every male customer at that Subway counter had probably been hitting on her day in and day out.

Point taken, but I felt we’d shared a connection and, I don’t know, call it a chemical reaction, I felt attracted to her and so I mustered some nerve and upped my game and reminded her that we’d met on the bus. She didn’t hesitate. She said no such event had ever occurred. I didn’t get angry. I said that it had and that I knew her name was Alma, which was correct, and so she said nothing. She didn’t say no, didn’t say yes either; she just wouldn’t admit to her name and she looked away each time I uttered it. I was young then. Insistent. Impatient.

But Alma, come on, Alma, we talked. You’re Alma, I know you are, we talked on the bus all the way until I got off at my place.

She just kept looking away as I continued to speak, and looking more fearful too, and a little upset. This made me nervous. I didn’t want to come off as harassing her, even though I’d ordered a sandwich and she was making it for me.

So, I decided to ask the Korean kid who worked there if Alma’s name was, in fact, Alma. With a blank look, the Korean kid wouldn’t answer me. The Mexican kid, the third employee there behind the counter wouldn’t answer me either. They all played it dumb, wouldn’t say a word to any of my questions. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

Yet Alma finished making my sandwich, wrapped it for me and with a glance as hard as iron encouraged me, so to speak, to beat it out of there back into the sunshine. Once on the street, steaming, talking to myself, I hated the city for what it did to me, hating desire for what it did to me, hating the walls put up between races and ethnicities. I couldn’t hate Alma. There was too much beauty and succulence in her. Nor could I hate her co-workers. They were young and just defending her. I hated myself for thinking I’d even stood a chance with someone like Alma. For all I knew, she was married and had a kid or maybe while on the bus she’d been doubting her looks and had wanted to see if she was still attractive.

I had to let it go. Maybe Alma had just wanted to play me. Maybe she was laughing over the look of humiliation that had reddened my gringo features. Or maybe while on the bus she felt safer if she was talking to someone. It wasn’t as if we were in Brentwood or the tonier parts of Santa Monica or Los Feliz, or the hills themselves above Sunset. Hoover, Jefferson, Vermont, Crenshaw and all the way south into Watts and Compton wasn’t a region of the city anyone with half a brain, no matter which race or gender, felt entirely safe of comfortable in. Even the air felt different there to me, like a yellow fuzz that left sleeves of sweat that itched and spread beading across my lower back and up the sides of my neck, especially when riding the bus with all the grimy and weary new immigrants and working folk. Or while watching others in their newly washed and waxed cars, and in my case needing to walk home with my Alma-wrapped Subway sandwich and my can of soda.

I had no answers. I’d need to live without ever knowing, but at least I’d tried. Alma had sent her message. She just wasn’t interested. Maybe it was a racial thing. Who knew? Certainly not me.

Once I got to my building, I walked past the unit of the burned-out long-haired AA dude who lived a few doors down and had tried to convert me to Jesus. I stopped a moment and looked at his door and considered knocking. Maybe he could shed some light on this Alma issue. I decided against this when I remembered a story he’d told me about an incident with an ironing board he’d had with his last girlfriend. This connected me to my incident with Alma. My AA neighbor had told me that he’d been in one big argument after another with this girlfriend until one night he’d knocked her ironing board over in a fit of rage. This had forced her hand. That’s how he’d put it.

She hadn’t wanted to. We were living a fantasy, he’d said to me. But I’d made her come down to earth. That’s when she dumped me for good.

The girlfriend had chased him out and demanded he never come back. Maybe this was what I’d done with Alma. Scared her off. Brought her down to earth. The meeting on the bus must have been for Alma something like a scene from a romantic movie. My showing up at Subway and seeing her in a hairnet, well, that was crossing a line into reality. It was showing her I wasn’t a dream. I was real and I was interested, but I wasn’t anything special, after all.

My neighbor had told me that he hadn’t argued with his girlfriend. She dumped me, essentially. This brought me down to earth. I’m a drunk, man, it kind of dawned on me, I guess.

Yeah, it dawned on him. At least the guy had found Jesus and was doing his best to wrestle with his demons and bring a sense of self-respect and control back into his life. Man, how many people are out there doing just that? It’s scary to think just how many.

This led me to remember the reason why I’d been on the bus in the first place and didn’t own a car in a city like LA. I’d had an accident, a serious one, which made me no better than my thug friend who sold smack and had been busted in Canada. By a miracle – and perhaps this was what all these lessons were, little miracles – I hadn’t been injured. No one had, but the cops and DMV had revoked my driver’s license, not because I’d been drinking or driving to endanger, but because I had past fines and late fees due. I owed the state of California all sorts of money.

My response to this debt had been ridiculous. A fantasy. I’d believed that all those expenses would go away if I just stopped thinking about them.

They hadn’t, of course. I’d considered phoning my parents and begging for money so I could at least pay the fees and get my license back. It’s hard to live in LA without a car and a license and my parents would know this, but they didn’t have money to dish out to one of their sons when he screwed up. Calling them would only make them angry at me. I could hear my father saying I should have been happier and more appreciative that I’d owned a car in the first place. I could hear my mother more than my father really get on my case and say I was stupid and thoughtless and needed to wake up. She’d have been right to say such things, of course, but I wasn’t going to provide her with that opportunity.

Even though it took me a long time, months and months, I got the money together just the same. I worked side hustles along with my full-time gig. I cut back on my expenses. Once I was able to get myself out of debt with the DMV, I needed to wait another couple of months before getting my license back. Then it took me about half a year to save enough to make a down payment on a car that I’m still paying for.

I tell you, when I think about what the dreams I had when younger eventually fizzled into, and how out of place, hosed down and glaringly idiotic I must have appeared in downtown LA at that time, it’s a wonder I’m still alive and didn’t send a bullet into my brain. I rode a cheap bike to work each day, and not a minute passed without me thinking that maybe I should have gone back to where I came from, just throw in the towel on my big Hollywood fantasy, but what kept me there was that I knew back home they were just waiting for me to show up one day, head between my knees, a failure, and I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t satisfy any of their potentially hateful sadistic impulses; I’d rot in the LA sunshine if I had to, stinking like blood and mucus and the wormy reek of failed ambitions, the jackboots of fate denting my skull, one kick at a time, until I blacked out, my wings clipped, my body slumped on the ground with a copy of Genet in my back pocket. Oh Momma send me back into my amniotic cocoon where I hear soft waves from a sunbeam riding me across the shores of my body.

I suppose all the dreams we have when younger aren’t really afflictions. They simply come. They’re part of being young and in bloom