Do You Write Happy Stories? I Prefer Happy Stories...

Crazy in Alabama

I found something I wrote fifteen years ago during my first year of living alone in Alabama. My apartment in Homewood wasn’t far from the statue of Vulcan up on Red Mountain. I had a magnet on the refrigerator where I’d scrawled the words “Crazy in Alabama” and above those words, I’d written -“Don’t go…”

A few visitors would look at the magnet but never said anything. People are polite in the South. Don’t mention the crazy warning blaring on the fridge. It was a nod to Mark Childress, but I can’t remember what compelled me to write it down in green marker and stick it on the fridge.

Freaking out and alone a lot, I felt more sane in the classroom, which grounded me with curious, big-hearted students and their stories. But my first office was a kind of supply room, and one of my first nights on campus, the nervous secretary, leaving for the day, knocked on my door and asked me, “Tell me, do you write happy stories? I prefer happy stories.”

“Well,” I began, but she wasn’t listening. Then she said, “I am worried about you being on campus at night in this old building.”

It was only a little after five on an August evening. My office was in the old Humanities Building that is now no more.

I said, “I’ll be fine. Do you want to lock the door?”

“Yes, please.”

So she locked my office door as she left, and I carried on working, trying to gather my wits for the three classes I’d be teaching soon, battling homesickness. When I went to leave a few hours later, I realized she’d locked me inside. The door only locked from the outside.

What?

I call my friend, Danny, the poet. “So the secretary locked me in my office.”

Danny sighed. “Geez. Great. I’m so sorry. Call campus police. They’ll let you out. The secretary is a little high-strung. Just show them your campus ID.”

“I don’t have a campus ID yet.”

“Just show them your license. I’m really sorry.”

So campus police officer came and I showed him my California driver’s license and assured him I was an assistant professor of English, and he let me out.

Before I took the job, I had a conversation with my son in the spring of that year. He was twenty and a junior at UC Santa Barbara and would be a senior when/if I took the job. He asked me to go with him to a coffee shop to talk, so we walked together through the streets of Silver Lake like we’d done forever.

At the coffee shop, he said, “Please, Mama. Don’t take the job in Alabama. Please. Don’t leave California. Please, Mama.”

I remember telling him, “I’m just going to give it a try. If it’s awful, I’ll come home.”

He looked so worried, but part of me wanted the adventure of something new and different. And we were perpetually broke with his sister starting college in the fall. I felt like I had to try, and I tried to explain this but he only said, “Please, Mama. Don’t go. This is where our family belongs. Please, Mama.”

I don’t know why I still think about that conversation or why its vividness has stayed with me. Maybe because he’s still in California, and I don’t know where he is most days or how to reach him. It’s almost his birthday. Another year.

Anyway, I changed offices after my first year in Birmingham. An Irish professor, Kieran Quinlan, who wrote beautiful essays about his boyhood in Ireland and early years in the monastery, told me my new office (that had a regular lock on the inside) had once belonged to Richard Yates (for one year in the 80s) and to Dennis Covington (for many years).

Richard Yates? Dennis Covington?

This news stunned me.

I had assigned Yates’s Saying Goodbye to Sally many times to UCLA fiction students where I’d taught as an adjunct, and I’d just read Salvation on Sand Mountain and the essays Dennis Covington’s wife, Vicki Covington called Women in a Man’s World Crying and the book they cowrote together Cleaving.

I asked Kieran if he was sure about Richard Yates, and then he gave me a picture of the UAB English Department from the 80s. I studied it, and I thought of Yates and Covington in that horrid, windowless office in the Humanities Building, and I felt a connection, a relief, and a sadness too. I would never know or talk to them, but they had met with students in this office. They crafted stories and lives in Alabama.

Had they shut the door and cried too?

I googled Richard Yates and Alabama, and I had no idea the struggle that was the end of his life, smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, not wanting to die in Dixie. (Spoiler, he did.)

***

Anyway, I found this journal entry from that time, fifteen years ago.

That fall of 2009, Lucy was turning nineteen at Sarah Lawrence College. I was writing what would become Werewolf Hamlet without a clue of how to plot the book, but I had so much more living to do before I could write it. It was not an efficient way to write. I renamed Jack Gettlefinger, Angus Jack Gettlefinger.

In truth, I was spending a lot of time watching my odd neighbors and too much Deadwood. I watched so much Deadwood alone, that I half-expected the handsome sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) or gloriously profane barkeep (Ian McShane) or brilliant Calamity Jane (Robin Weingert) to come strolling into the courtyard, taking no prisoners.

In one of her early short stories, Carson McCullers watched her neighbors too, and I refer to that in this piece below. I couldn’t remember the name of the short story, but I’ve since looked it up, and it’s called Court in West Eighties. My little apartment in Homewood circa 2009 was a little like Carson’s in her story published first in 1933. Norah was living her fifth grade with Kiffen in California and would not join me until the sixth grade. Flannery was a senior at UC Santa Barbara, and Lucy, a freshman at Sarah Lawrence was spending her first birthday away from home.

Here is an excerpt of Court in West Eighties by Carson McCullers:

The warmer it got the more things changed. All of us around the court began to pin back our curtains to let the air into our small rooms and move our beds close to the windows. When you can see people sleep and dress and eat you get to feel that you understand them - even if you don’t know know their names. Besides the man with the red hair there were others whom I began to notice now and then.

There was the cellist whose room was at a right angle with mine and the young couple living above her. Because I was at my window so much I could not help but see nearly everything that happened to them. I knew the young couple were going to have a baby very soon, and that, although she didn’t look too well, they were very happy. I knew about the cellist’s ups and downs too.

That’s how it felt watching my neighbors from the window, and now some of those neighbors inspire characters in my new children’s novel, Millie G and Vulcan, about a little girl who makes a wish to Vulcan because she needs a giant in her life to fix things.

Yesterday was Lucy’s birthday, and she spent it at her home in Chicago. These years are going by at lightning speed.

Don’t leave California, Mama. Please.

I think I thought I could hold time in each place - walk through a door in California and another door in Alabama, and keep all the plates spinning.

I could not.

Warming up to write...in a new room - November 2009

I moved things around in the apartment yesterday. I've pretty much ignored the "spare" room or "Norah's" room here in Homewood, but I happened to walk by it in the afternoon and it was filled with cold fall sunlight that bathed the room in yellow and gold. So I dragged the desk into this room to work on Jack Gettlefinger.

I've also started NANOWRIMO - National Novel Writing Month - in hopes of pounding out approximately 1600 words or so a day. I have 16 chapters already but I need to write to the end of the book, but I don't know the end. I wish I could see things more clearly, but when I show up and engage with the characters, things happen.

I've also been watching my neighbors...Carson McCullers wrote a story about her neighbors in Brooklyn, but I can't remember the name of it...living in an apartment is like watching tiny dramas unfold.

Girl on the cell: She's not a girl, but she's thin and willowy and walks around the apartment complex on her cell...She's always on her cell phone wandering around from place to place usually upset about something, smoking. She has a tiny dog.

A staunch Catholic who has a statue of the Virgin Mary in her part of the yard. She feeds the birds and has created a feeder that the squirrels can't get to at all. They leap on it and swing from it but can't manage to retrieve the birdseed. I heard her tell another neighbor, "You're lucky you get to tell your sins to God. I have to find a priest to absolve me of my sins."

A fix-it man...He's the handyman with a beautiful black lab named Lucy. He drives a truck, hunts, and loves that dog. He and some other guy hung up blinds for me and said, "Can't have nobody running around nekkid without blinds." He laughed and laughed.

The older lady who babysits the little boy...She used to anyway but now he's started preschool...I lent her some children's books to read to the little boy when he was still coming to her place, but she thought I meant to give them away and so gave them to the boy. I explained that I needed them back for my children's literature students (and for me!). She got them back but accidentally threw them away. It was traumatic - the thought of my beautiful (and some signed) eight picture books in the trash gone to a landfill or dump. As I questioned her, she said, "Even if they were still in the dumpster, who would want them? I'm so sorry. I feel so bad. So bad" I knew she did feel bad. It was an accident. But I said, "Could they be in there do you think?" In seconds we were down digging through the dumpster together. (This will be an essay or story.) And she found them, mostly salvageable, and she cried, "Sweet Jesus. I have a guardian angel. And you do too!" I fished them out and set them out to dry on the grass, and the lady said, "I'll watch them. Nobody will touch them," and she did.

Okay, it’s time to work on Jack Gettlefinger and catch up on students’ stories. Tomorrow is Lucy's birthday. She'll be 19, and she said, "I don't want it to be my birthday and not be at home.

This weekend is Washington DC and the American Girl Fundraiser for the Prevention of Blindness. I’ll fly there and see Aunt Sally and talk about writing stories.

I'm missing my kids so much lately. Maybe it was being away from them for the first Halloween ever...but it's not long until Thanksgiving, and it's a gorgeous Appalachian fall here.