Segue

It was quite windy today; I thought I was in a Clint Eastwood movie. Leaves took refuge, like dry skinned orphaned children, in front entrance niches of businesses in downtown. Shopkeepers could not shoo the leaves away; each customer brought in more leaves until small drifts formed on the carpeted and tiled floors. I brought in leaves as I entered a stationary shop in search of letterhead. It was not just any letterhead. It had to have some tooth to it. The letterhead had to announce, “By gad, I am serious about this writing business!”

The mistress of the shop, a discerning middle-aged Hispanic woman with dark brown hair and eyes, listened to my romantic drivel about the paper I was seeking. I was not the usual customer, yet the lack of a poncho and a cigar, or the attire of a conquistador, perplexed her. The tone of my voice was remarkably similar to Eastwood’s, I was surprised by the raspy tone, as if my regular voice had gone on sabbatical and Eastwood was doing a cameo. The mistress smiled when I finished my oratorio and said, “I think I have something to make your day, Mr. Eastwood. Right this way.”

I followed her down a side aisle packed on either side with reams of paper. We perused the reams she had in stock, and quickly determined she didn’t have what I wanted, but she said she could get it by the following day. Her dark eyes flashed as she said thirty-two pound paper was my Holy Grail. Thirty-two pound letterhead is not that common. It used to be used to build ramps for storming castles. It was common when cotton was king, and trees with circumferences of twenty feet were de rigueur. It made dandy picnic plates for Victorian couples. Bamboo is the new goddess from the east. Everything is made of bamboo. It is ten million times stronger than steel. I am smitten with her, but not for letterhead. But as towels, clothes, armored personnel carriers, or flooring, she easily wins the day. But I digress.

The mistress took my order. I said it had to be ivory colored, off-white, the kind of color Dukes and Earls would regularly press their signet rings to. The kind I could precisely fold and slide into Medici style envelopes. The kind that demanded the use of red sealing wax and my cheap brass letter ‘D’ stamp. The kind that implied I was a baron with title and land. Yes, landed gentry letterhead that announced my full intention to attend a gala affair in my 1940s Bentley. The kind of paper that would inspire me to write adlib pithy poems, or dystopian query letters, sent by horseback courier to literary agents, or snooty editors who guffawed at the improper use of apostrophes. I mean the make believe paper made for mystics with Pomeranians on their laps.

The shop mistress looked at me as if I had lost my marbles, and I had of course, writers lose their minds every day they draw breath. Her nubile apprentice, a fetching blonde of forty years, turned and smiled in pity, as if I’d just emerged from the Middle Ages, or thawed from a glacier high in the Alps. As if I were Sideshow Bob, recently released from a passing circus, or a troglodyte that had crawled from beneath a dark slab of prehistoric rock.

The paper arrived in an enchanted carriage, pulled by six white stallions, and steered by two faux rat footmen from the Cinderella story. The box weighed forty pounds, though it was only 250 sheets of paper. I lifted the lid of the gold leaf covered ream. There was the scent of sultry Santa Barbara nights of long ago, when flowering vines on the trellises of Spanish Colonial villas, perched high above the sunset hued harbor, released their seductive perfume to the night. I held a sheet and remembered the embrace of a woman I had tango danced with in lonely nights long ago, when all I lived for was the sound of milonga, and the taste of mangoes..

The paper was slightly cream colored, like the Warren Lustro Dull I once had a thing for in the heyday of my advertising career. Then I was a graphic guru, a pasha of printed works, of textures and treatments for esoteric papers with which to pad my portfolio. I was no stranger to foils, fancy die cuts, embossing, and finishes. Fonts were my fortissimo then, but not now. Impressing people wasn’t my raison d’etre any longer. Now I was enamored with film and the use of words to tell a story. I had thrown off the gregarious narcissism of advertising for the solitary confinement of the ivory tower. There was only the sound of one hand clapping, and it was my own.

Words are not like dry autumn leaves that find sanctuary in the doorways of shops on windy days. They are limber and green, subtle and sultry. They easily describe pale orange leaves that once were attached to young maples in our hometowns and in the forests outside Moscow. They tell tales of the leaves as being like garments that wrapped themselves around a young couple whose love was forbidden. Hidden there by the words whose leafy disguise made the couple's love possible, the couple kissed for the first time. Stars fell from their places; meteorites plummeted with the touch of the couple's lips.  Words of love poured like the runoff from the rock laden streams. Aspen and spruce trees bent by winter snows listened to the words. Words, like leaves whipped by errant winds, turned chameleon colors of flame and rust and took their rest upon my secret manuscripts. Like spirits, they haunted my observations and dreams. They assembled when I was cogent and rational, and they spread in disarray when ideas came fast and furious, late at night and in the wee hours of the morning when testosterone ran hot and heavy, and soul and flesh ached for love and passion.

And so I found my paper; my muse. My fingertips rested upon it in the night when words, like rain, tapped upon the windows of my soul and would not let me sleep. While the world settled into dreams, late when the wolves roamed and owls glided with silent wings, I was up writing queries to editors and agents. I knew my writing was flawed but it was mine. I consoled my doubts by reminding myself that all writers are flawed or they would not be writers. Best to keep a meat cleaver handy because no story is complete without endless hacking and rewrites. I knew editors make writers digestible, and would add sprigs of herbs to my works. Literary agents would one day reach with outstretched arms for my diamonds in the rough. I recalled an editor, who liked one of my novels, writing of my bad habits that were like the telltale clues left by a homicidal murderer. Mistakes that would hang me and identify me to an editor with a detective's eye, and a jury of my peers. My flaws, in my view, were endearing speech impediments or limps. I reasoned someone with a love of the archaic ways, a literary agent or editor with the sensibilities of a 32 pound paper, would show empathy for a leper-like writer in need of healing. Would I be marooned indefinitely on Molokai? Would my magic realism and film noir tales never see the light of day? My characters came to me in the night and begged for help but I could not console them.

People in the publishing industry tend to overlook impediments if the content is intriguing, and the author can make them lots of money, or the author is related to George Clooney. It is like a racing aficionado looking at the thigh muscle of a middle-aged horse and realizing the horse could still win the Triple Crown. It would be like a recruiter for Nike taking a look at my frame and having the epiphany that with six months of training I could win the Boston Marathon. But myopia is commonplace in the publishing world. Why do I inflict this pain upon myself? Have I forgotten that rejection is the Mother of All Sorrows? Have I forgotten Brautigan? A literary life can lead to an untimely demise. Would paper, regardless of its weight, its tooth - make any difference in a world of electronic rejection? What good were wax seals? I was Van Gogh with a loaded revolver ready to blow my brains out. If I could imagine flinging my characters off the Golden Gate Bridge then what other dark things lay within my soul? Dare I expect the world to marvel at my bravery to keep going when all my organs failed but my runner's heart? Who did I think I was with my melodramatic pauses and florid descriptions? Would the world want my ceviche when it could have a cheeseburger from Micky D's? I was cut of ancient cloth, out of step with the modern age. I was the unwilling jester of the Creator of the Universe.

When your true love comes for you in the night, leave your door ajar. Let her come softly into your chamber in her blue diaphanous gown, her breasts and hips moving like ripe fruit beneath the gown's silky folds. Study her limpid eyes and pouty mouth, wet as the Sea of Cortes in moonlight. Let her lie down with you in your bed and rise up in the morning when the words are fresh in your mind, spilling through the windows like California sunshine, demanding to be written. The words will be obtuse, mystical, magical, and strange. Exhibit A. I saw a van today that had the following words emblazoned in red paint on its side: Rice furniture and appliances. Now, I know next to nothing about either offering, but if they are made of rice I might hesitate in  my purchase. If your name was Rice, would you have used it in this way to advertise your business? I have heard of bean bag chairs, but, rice bag chairs? Really? The world is full of lampoons; you need only open your eyes to see the comedy unfold.

Yesterday I emailed three queries to the same agent in Canada. There is something kinder in Canada. Maybe they know something about the literary merits of dry leaves gathering in doorways. Perhaps they remember their humble roots. Or possibly the long winters have shown them something of the need to pull together and not tear asunder, as is the American way. They are in touch with their mortality and thus, in their despair and darkness have found comfort and communion with their maker. All hail Canada, the birthplace of John Candy, and Celine Dion! All hail this Canadian literary agent, to whom I have entrusted some of my works.

You can tell a great deal from an image. Some Native Americans once believed photos stole a part of their souls. This is true. Photos are snapshots of our souls at a point in time. They show the state of our joy, or lack thereof. I settled upon the face of an agent whose face told me she was a genuine person. She hailed from England, the mother of America. She was eagerly seeking new talented writers. I suspect she is fond of the old sensibilities, the use of wax seals on quality 32 pound paper, the observations of details, and the beauty of the words. Rain still streaks my windows in the night, like the fingertips of lost children, as I lay sleeping and dreaming of better days. In the daytime the sky offers hues of gray, broken by pale blue gaps that fade towards the horizon. Clouds can change to many different colors in one day, so can fortunes. Wind drives the clouds across the sky in a never-ending dance. Words, driven by the wind like curled, pale orange leaves, find sanctuary in the doorway of your mind.