Every Third Thought (8 page)

But that’s another story: the blooming springtime of their teens and twenties and the American Century’s ’40s and ’50s, following these Winter’s-end first stirrings of their nascent sap, so to speak.

“Another
nom de plume
for the pair of you, maybe:
Nascent Saps
?”

Touché
. And in the Here and Now, as the vernal equinox of 2008 approaches, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin at least nominally transfer authority over their respective domains
to each’s hand-picked successor; Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still go at it in the early Democratic presidential primaries; the dollar slides; crude oil tops $100 a barrel; the Iraq war, then in its fifth year, costs the U.S. some $21 billion per month; the Taliban regains strength in our stalemated Pakistan/ Afghanistan misadventure; severe late-winter storms strike California and the midwestern and northeastern states (but spare our mid-Atlantic Tidewaterland); and in early March a woman in Kansas is discovered not only to have been living secluded in her bathroom for two years, but to have remained seated so long on her toilet that the skin of her butt has grown literally attached to the seat, which must be removed before her discoverer/rescuers can transport her to hospital for its surgical detachment.

Which reminds George Irving Newett, changes changed, of his hibernating Muse—who however now bestirs herself to prompt him (better never than late?) to close this section of this Whatever with a couple of Last Things from the “Winter” of his&Ned’s preadolescent boyhood....

But she then on Second Thought remembers, or is by him reminded, that we
did
that already, just a few pages back....

And so on Third Thought we say, “Literal and figurative First Winter,
adieu
,” and bid the Reader (if he/she’s still out there) to follow Pete Seeger’s season-song’s advice:

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
O HIS PAL George Newett, “Solstices are mine,” Ned Prosper declared one late-March morning back in their Stratford High days (he having been born on one, Q.E.D.). And by the same reasoning, “Equinoxes are yours.”

Sixty years later, recollective G.I.N. assumes this declaration to have been made Nedward-style, his friend’s right fist clenched thumb-up for emphasis, and followed some while after by “On
second
thought [forefinger raised beside thumb and pointed Georgeward like a cocked pistol], I guess that gives me just the
winter
solstice and you the
fall
equinox, right? And so
on
third
thought [raising middle finger to make three, then closing thumb and fore to make the Up Yours gesture with middle solo],
fuck
all that. Last day of winter! First of spring! Time to lose our fucking cherries, man!”

“The word that won the war,” British soldiers called that all-purpose Anglo-Saxon expletive,
⁴
so common in adult fiction and film dialogue nowadays as to raise scarcely an eyebrow
⁵
(G. writes these lines on Just Another Workday Morning in 2008), but still such a No-No back then as to make Stratford/Bridgetown teenage boys feel macho/horny just saying it aloud. Even a dozen years later, when America’s warafter-
that
will have ended in Korea (and Ned’s life as well, in Baja California, with his first and only “novel” just begun) and G.I.N.’s own maiden effort will have lucked into modest, short-lived print, the Word remained so touchy that the book’s university-press publisher considered it daring for one of G.’s characters, an aggrieved wife, to demand of her former college roommate, “Why in God’s name did you fuck my husband, Jane?” To which her ex-best friend replies with a shrug, “Takes two to tango, Barb: Go ask Pete why he fucked
me
.” And in the novel’s even shorter-lived British edition, that
once-war-winning verb was unaccountably softened, without authorial permission, to “bed.”

“And why the F-blank-blank-blank are you telling Dear Reader this?” inquires Poet/Professor/Critic/Wife Amanda Todd of
her
(still-effing-faithful and faithfully-effing) spouse. Who happens to be wondering the same thing, sort of, but suspects it may be his vagrant Muse’s lead-in to Dream/Vision/Transport/ Whatever #2, which occurred not quite
on
the ’08 vernal equinox, but closer thereto than #1 to the ’07 winter solstice. It was, he’ll grant, less a flat-out vision than a dream-inspired reverie, involving (he just now notes) not the several B’s of that badboy Brinsley/Burlesque/Brassiere poem, but about as many S’s: Springtime. Sex. Sudden Storms . . .

“In short,” Mandy will tease when he bores her with all this during a pre-coital wake-up chat in each other’s arms the morning after the Dream, “Much B.S. About Nothing?” But then—parodying The Isley Brothers this time instead of the Bard—she’ll croon, “
C’mon, baby, lemme shake your spear
!”

Bear in mind, s.v.p., that “all this season/vision shit,” as G. himself will come to call it—the pattern of more-or-lesscoincident season-turns and more-or-less illuminations—hadn’t yet been established. But Narrator’s preoccupation with equinoxes/solstices/seasons and their association with youthful buddy Ned Prosper very much
had
been; enough so that as winter faded and spring arrived but nothing quite came together at His still-unfamiliar new workspace (the way he could imagine it might have done back in His dear “old” one
in Heron Bay Estates before its tornadoing), he could not help wondering “where the flowers is.” Town and campus were a-bloom with crocuses, forsythia, daffodils, jonquils, hyacinths, and tulips, but his Muse’s garden-plot, while not altogether bud- and sprout-free, remained blossomless. Mocking the deep-Southern accent of one of his favorite professor-coaches back at Tidewater State U. (who often exaggerated it himself to humorous effect), G.I.N. used to advise his own StratColl coachees, “Y’all wannabe
Cree
-ay-tive Rotters, y’gotta learn how to Rot Cree-
ay-
tively.” By which was meant that they should turn, re-turn, and monitor the fermenting compost of their imagination—its lumps and shards of observation, sensation, experience, and reflection as registered in notebook-notes or pungent memory—until certain of them somehow came together, germinated, and flowered into poem or story.

Creative Rotting.

On the locally-mild winter’s closing day, for example, George Irving Newett’s notebook noted:
Th 3/20/08: V. Equinox (= “V.E. Day”?) + 5th anniversary of U.S. Iraq invasion. New prisoner abuses revealed @ Abu Ghraib & Guantanamo. 200 anti-war demonstrators arrested in D.C. (Bush/Cheney dismiss protests). China arrests 4000 Tibetan protesters (embarrassment to upcoming Beijing Olympics).

The days immediately following had their own, similarly So What? entries, each concluding with that same folk-proverbial
question, to which the diarist found his fancy more and more turning, turning, turning....

Wait: How’s that? “Turn, turn, turn”: the refrain of Pete Seeger’s earlier-cited “To Everything There Is a Season,” which now (i.e., “then,” back in winter/spring season-turning time) reminded our floundering fictor of that anti-war folk-ballad composed by the same gifted hand after his McCarthy-era indictment by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, and popular right through the Vietnam-War ’60s and’70s: not the rustic “I wonder where the flowers is?”, it occurred to him on one of those post-equinoctial mornings, but “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, its poignantly circular lament here abridged as in G.I.N.’s immediate notebook-note:

No time soon, it would appear. Half a century after those verses’ composition, the nation remained mired in two more indecisive wars at a cost of billions of dollars per month and more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel “gone to graveyards every one,” along with 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans. The economy was in deep shit from home-mortgage foreclosures, the virtual collapse of the real-estate market, the soaring cost of oil, and record federal-budget deficits. Our international approval rating sank along with the lame-duck president’s, while his administration blithely continued such Fuck-the-Constitution policies as detainee torture, arrogation of power to the executive branch, and presidential “signing orders” to avoid implementing congressionally-passed bills that the White House disapproved of but chose not to veto. And the economic disparity between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of their countrymen grew to Gilded Age, brink-of-Depression size. When would we ever learn?

Maybe by the upcoming November election—but it was late March still, and G. I. Newett had no more idea than did his drowsing Muse why the F-blank-blank-blank he was telling his notebook all this. What he knew—
all
he knew, in this department—was that at bedtime on or about Sunday, March 23 (Easter Sunday, as it irrelevantly happens), as he and his mate turned to each other for their customary lights-out embrace, the “Cree-ay-tive Rotting” part of his Imagination felt the equivalent of an impending . . . orgasm? Or burp? Sneeze? Fart? He even pressed his eyes more tightly shut; squeezed his Fancy, so to speak (as unobtrusively as possible, not to alarm his bedmate), to Make It Happen. But succeeded only in falling asleep, as he realized with initial disappointment some two hours later, at First Urination Time, then again with a groggy sigh three hours after that, at Second U.T., and finally towards dawn, with the opposite of disappointment, when a brief earlyspring thundershower—quite unusual for that still-chilly time of year—rolled over Stratford/Bridgetown and roused him from that long-since-signaled

 

over in a flash/bang, appropriately, of
Donner und Blitzen
⁷
:

Whoosh of wind and rush of rain. “Here it comes!” Observer/ Narrator huddles for shelter on wet beach with high-spirited others among pilings under ocean boardwalk or pier as sudden squall moves ashore from open water. “Coming . . . coming . . . ” Beach umbrellas cartwheel off; roaring wind blows rain almost horizontal.
“CAME!”
Flashbang! Then going . . . going . . .

 

Gone, and the dreamer woke both exhilarated and a bit embarrassed as the brief present storm rumbled off eastward. Embarrassed to find that he’d had a “wet dream” in both senses, the drenching rain plus a lusty ejaculation—literal in the dream, but virtual in waking fact, Dreamer not having experienced a literal “nocturnal emission” since his latter teens. Embarrassed further that the (hind-to) dream-ejaculatee had been not his beloved Amanda (whom he woke to find himself embracing from behind, his pajama-bottomless front pressed against her ditto rear), but . . .

 

 

“Something bothering you?” wonders Narrator’s waking wife. With whom, once he gets it duly notebooked for his Muse’s consideration, he’ll share a discreetly edited account of that flashbang “vision’s” reverberations—immediately clear to him, unlike his earlier fire-watchtower one:

 

“Used to be,” Ned liked to say, “every fucking generation had to have its fucking war. French and Indian War! Revolutionary War! War of 1812! Civil War! Spanish-American
War! World Wars One and Two! Now it’s one every goddamn
Olympiad:
Cold War, Korean War, and next it’ll be Vietnam or Red China! Get us outta here!”

To Canada, maybe? We’ve considered that, not very seriously, as a possible last resort if push actually comes to shove, but meanwhile have our hands full deciding what to do next fall if, as we hope, our Guard units
aren’t
activated and our draft-exempt status remains valid. Both of us are convinced by now that our vocation is “Creative Rotting,” and both have applied to Master of Arts programs in that field (newly popular in American universities) for further practice and mentoring. Ned, who has published a short story already in
The Stratford Review
and is beginning a novel, has early-acceptance notices from the University of Iowa’s pioneering two-year M.F.A. program and Johns Hopkins’ newer but also well-rated oneyear M.A. program. Narrator (nothing published yet, but several pieces going the rounds of little magazines) has applied to those and others as well, but has thus far heard positively only from TSU’s own brand-new Master’s program, to be inaugurated next fall. Our current inclination, we guess—“First Thought,” as it were—is to marry our girlfriends if necessary to beat the draft (G. and Marsha, while not officially engaged, have pretty much decided they’ll marry anyhow, either after college or after grad school; Ned and Ginny’s connection is more off-and-on, in several respects), put in a couple years’ advanced apprenticeship somewhere or other, hope to score with a few lit-mags or maybe even a book publisher, and consider
teaching to pay the rent, at least until and unless we “make it” as professional fictioneers.