A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  When they were dating and later living together, he wrote poems to her. He handed her his stories. At graduate school, he got a B on his first essay, and a B at grad school is tantamount to failure. That’s when the poems and stories became less frequent, and his neck pains began as he poured over books in the university library. When the library closed, he brought the books home with him. When his eldest was a baby, she would cry throughout the night, and when the morning light came the only thing that could make Jacob fall asleep was the fact that he had read himself into exhaustion and his eyes would not stay open. Was that the moment the passion had left him? What had he received in return when he traded his dream away?

  He stood beside his desk and dug down into the box. On the higher layers were clippings of the occasions when he was presenting the medal for the student who finished with the highest average in his courses. In another, a valedictorian had quoted something Jacob had said in class one day, a throw-a-way comment he couldn’t remember making. The words had changed the student’s life. What Jacob had said had been an accident, and somewhere, out there in the real world, not the world of the classroom but the real world where people work, and live, and die, someone was living off a passing thought of his.

  The rubber cement had become heady by mid-morning, and because he was between terms, Jacob went up stairs and lay down in the spare room bed where his dog curled up beside him. He remembered Laddie’s days as a puppy. Jacob had taught him to fetch, which Laddie seldom got right. Jacob had taught him to roll over, which now the dog couldn’t do because he had grown too fat. Jacob understood the dog. He and Laddie were cut from the same cloth. Both had failed to pay the price for wanting to dream.

  Jacob woke in the mid-afternoon. It was a hot day and something had gone wrong with the air conditioning because he was soaked in a sweat. The young man was standing over him.

  The young man said: “Hi.”

  Jacob said: “Hi. How did you get in?”

  “I let myself in. You shouldn’t work with that glue stuff your wife bought at the dollar store. It will ruin your brain.”

  “I seem to recall a young man who put back enough beers to kill several brains.”

  “You had more than enough to kill. Look where it got you.” The young man paused and stared out the bedroom window. Jacob thought he could hear waves in the distance, but passed it off as the sound of traffic.

  “Busy out there on the road, eh?” Jacob said, trying to smile at the youth.

  “No, those really are waves you hear. You’re sort of remembering Pendergast. Don’t say you don’t remember Pendergast. He always sat behind you in Chaucer class with a big bag of onions he carried around. Remember him? He was the class Byron. All the girls loved him until they tried to sleep with him. He was so fucking drunk he’d pass out or throw up all over them. He wrote poems. Good poems. Maybe great poems. You remember Pendergast. He hitchhiked all the way to Mexico, to Baja somewhere. He sent you a postcard that you threw away because you thought he was a jerk. All the postcard said was: ‘Got high on peyote and drunk on tequila and had a shit in the ocean. Go fuck yourself, Jake.’”

  “Yeah, so? What about him.”

  “You thought you should have been like him. You thought: ‘Man, that guy’s a real author. A veritable Bukowski. An F. Scott Fitzgerald, only far drunker and less into the bling and glitz.’ You know what happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “No, he killed himself. He hanged himself. He wove razor blades into his noose and when they found him three days later hanging in the middle of a squalid little room in the worst part of town he’d managed to almost cut his head off.”

  “So?”

  “So you ran away from writing because you thought that is what a writer has to do. You were fucking wrong, old fart, fucking wrong. Writing isn’t about the posturing. Neither is teaching. It is not about the Masterpiece Theatre study inside your front door. It is about putting words on the paper. It is about feeling the passion for life, cold, raw, dead-on, cold turkey, in your face, snow down your neck, sand in your mouth passion, and wrestling with it until you find the right words to tell someone about it in a way they’ve never heard before. What you’ve got to decide is not ‘Is literature worth it?’ but are you worth literature? Others half as talented died because they wanted to be like you or they wanted to be you. Are you worth the pain and suffering you are capable of putting into words? And think carefully, because my life, not just yours, but my life, the life you stopped living, is hanging on your decision, and if you die the way you have been living then I will die too, and none of it, not the reading, not the broken binding on old books, not an hour’s worth of living, or an hour waiting to be born will have been worth it if you choose badly. This is the grail moment, old fart.”

  “That’s bogus, cliché shit.”

  “That’s what you missed. That’s what you wanted to find. That’s what your courage wouldn’t lead you to.”

  Jacob was silent. He stared at the young man. The kid put his hands in his jeans pockets and shrugged. “So, I guess I just don’t know the answer that you don’t know. Is literature worth it? Are you worth literature? Are you going to be part of the conversation or are you just going to stand around making notes about it that don’t mean shit? Was all that reading, all that learning, all that surrogate for life shit, what you were looking for, or was it merely preparation to help you find what you needed to see rather than what you wanted to see? Was it sustenance or merely a feast of brief hopes?”

  Jacob stared at the floor for a long time. The dog got up beside him and put a paw on his knee. The kid had vanished. He wept into the Lab’s neck as he put his arms around the old pet, and every old tear that had been inside him for years smelled of old dog.

  When his wife came home at the end of the day, she passed by his study and asked why he hadn’t started dinner.

  “We’ll eat out later,” he said. He was typing at his keyboard. His desk was littered with pages of notes scribbled on lined newsprint paper like the kind he had stolen from his Grade One class. There were lists of names, and arrows pointing from one idea to another.

  “Are you writing again?”

  “Yes, but this time it isn’t about other writers. It is about me. I discovered something today I needed to say, that I’ve needed to say for a long time. I’m going to need you to come with me on this one. I resigned from the college today. I want to put the house on the market and move back into the city, somewhere downtown, where we can be close to things — things that we can see, and things we can imagine.”

  “Ah, Jake, this is rather sudden. I mean, geez, Jake.”

  “Look, the kids are all gone. They’ve been offering me a package at the college, and I just decided to take it. They want some new blood in there. They want those eager young part-timers who think they can teach literature fresh out of grad school and who will end up teaching others how to form a sentence. My time has come. I’ve almost forgotten who I was. I am remembering now. You’re part of what I was, and I think we can reclaim it together. I want to pass you poems when we’re watching some awful community theatre production. I want to stand up in a restaurant and scream a sonnet to you at the top of my lungs. I want to make love to you in the corner of a department store, and then tell you how beautiful you are.”

  “Maybe not the department store stuff. I thought the next thing you were going to tell me was that you’d found a blond and bought a red sports car.”

  “I need you on this. I got to the bottom of clippings box and I found a picture of myself. There it is.” He pointed to a yellowed clipping that was on the verge of crumbling.

  His wife picked it up off the desk. It was Jacob, years ago. He was tall and thin. He was at a party. His arm was around the woman he would marry and build a life with. He had just won a prize. The caption in the clipping said: “Greenhorn author will set the literary world ablaze.” And as his wife stood admiring the picture, she held it up to her husband to s
ee if there was something left in him of the young man she had fallen in love with, the boyish scholar who said he loved her more than words. His fingers were poised on the home row of an old portable Underwood.

  Then she looked at the Jake she still had. His fingers were flying over his computer keyboard, and the words spread across his monitor the way wildfires spread across a dry hillside and illumine the night with a consuming brightness, and more than enough tinder to feast on.

  The Day I Was Born

  “You have very artistic hands,” the policewoman said as she rolled my fingers slowly over the ink pad and pressed down on each fingernail to make sure the black smudge was evenly distributed on the record sheet.

  “What makes you say that? I rarely get compliments about my hands.”

  “The fingers,” she said. “They are long and strong, but have a fine, articulate quality to them. I see all sorts of hands in this business. Some come in bruised and battered. You can tell when someone has led a rough life. It isn’t just the scars and the callus-covered palms, but something about the resistance of each finger. The person might be co-operative, but the psychology is in the fingers. Your fingers roll easily.”

  I said, trying to hold back a smile: “So, I’m not a hardened criminal at heart?”

  “Definitely not,” she replied. “You are a people pleaser. If I were religious, I’d say you have a good soul. Strong, yes, but good at heart.” The policewoman added: “The Lord works in mysterious ways, and I gave up long ago trying to figure it all out. For me, life is just what comes along. Enjoy each moment. Don’t ask for it, just enjoy it and be glad it happened if it makes someone happy.”

  “Thank you,” I offered. “I don’t often hear kind words like that.”

  “There now, all done.” I was handed a wet-wipe as she fanned the fingerprint card, to dry the India ink fingerpaint. “You’re now on permanent record. I see a lot of hands in this line of work. Those kids are lucky to have you.”

  I had told her about the writing workshop I was offering as part of the local junior school summer program. I’d come in to the station to obtain a background check.

  “It’ll be a week or two,” she said. “These things take a while, barring any problems or complications.”

  “I don’t have any unpaid parking tickets, so that should speed things up. I don’t drive anymore. I’m a diabetic.”

  She didn’t smile, but shuffled the papers together and clipped the fingerprint card and my mugshot with the forms I had filled in. “You’re good to go.”

  I waited. A week passed. Then two. Then three. I phoned the police station. I asked: “Have I done something wrong? The school is waiting on my papers so they can prepare payments and such, and I’d like to know I can do the workshop before I put the work into preparing it.”

  The policewoman laughed. “Oh, if you did something wrong, you’d know about it. We’d make sure of that.”

  The idea struck me as comic. I imagined the police at my door as a voice shouted through the megaphone to come out with my hands up.

  The background check was to make sure I was safe to work with kids. I was going to teach a group of ten- to fourteen-year-olds how to write their memoirs. It was something I’d come up with when I was talking to the summer program co-ordinator. The picture ran through my mind of the group talking about the good old days. The idea was supposed to be a joke.

  Marjorie, the co-ordinator, had looked up from her notes during our meeting with a look of ‘eureka’ on her face. “Why of course. Why didn’t I think of that? They’d love it. Get them telling their own stories.”

  I hadn’t the heart to tell Marjorie that one should live a lot more life before trying to write about it. How could ten- to fourteen-year-olds have enough experience to make a good story of it? They’d all probably been on family vacations, and those trips would stand out in their minds, but I was willing to bet the idea of entertaining exotic experiences in distant lands, the stuff of great memoirs, wasn’t going to come up during the seminar. I even wagered with myself that they didn’t own a Moleskine notebook. The insert in every Moleskine said: ‘The treasured companion of Chatwin and Hemingway.’ Experienced memoirists, at least as I pictured them, had filled volumes of Moleskines with incredible adventures. Nonetheless, I went to the local drugstore and purchased ten inexpensive hard-backed notebooks that looked like Moleskines so the kids could record their adventures.

  The image of a ten-year-old writing in a notebook while sitting atop Machu Picchu made me smile. I said to Marjorie: “Sure, of course, I’m glad you like the idea. Let’s go with the memoir concept. Everyone has a story tell.”

  The class was advertised and filled quickly. I was terrified by the thought of working with kids. Adults? No problem. You can make jokes with cultural and historical references to adults, and someone, even just one person, always gets it. Undergraduates? They seem to know instinctively when a joke is thrown at them, and whether it is funny or an ugly bomb of a comment, they still laugh out of a survival instinct. Maybe it’s the Stockholm Syndrome. But kids? They frightened me because I wasn’t sure I could engage them enough to get them to tell their stories.

  The background check came through, just in time. The kids turned out to be great. I simply shut up for once and let them talk. Man, could they talk. They were the realest people I’d ever worked with. They taught me about the honesty of experience, how little things, ordinary things, are special and real, and how as we grow older we cease to notice what is wonderful about life. Life, for them, was a series of unfolding connections and discoveries comprehended through an insatiable curiosity. I was able to see the world from four-foot-three rather than six-foot-one. In the end, it was worth the wait for me to get the whole background thing approved. I learned so much from those kids. Kids that age have the best minds in the world. They want to know everything that can be known, but they haven’t forgotten what it is to not know. Maybe that’s innocence. I call it wisdom.

  They were good writers as well.

  One kid had an imaginary friend. I suppose just about every kid, at sometime or other, has an imaginary friend. I had been a lonely child. I had one. He was a kind elderly man who knew right from wrong, and who always wanted to guide me in the right direction. He disappeared when I went to kindergarten.

  One kid in my class, a young, shy girl who loved to speak in riddles, was very attached to her imaginary friend. Her friend was not very good, but the bad things that the shadow-self did made the real kid try even harder to be good. The shadow friend was a means by which she understood the things life asked of her. The friend made her a better person. I told her father that when he came to sign her out at the end of one of the last sessions.

  “Wouldn’t know any other,” he said with not the slightest hint of reservation or even wryness in his voice as he shook my hand and thanked me for getting his daughter to love writing.

  The days before the class began, however, were anxious ones for me. At the end of the third week of waiting for my papers to come through from the police department, I phoned the fingerprint lady and inquired about the delay. “Yes,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Your background check has been delayed, but it should be through in a day or so.”

  I hesitated. I said: “What exactly am I supposed to have done? Am I wanted in three provinces?”

  The woman laughed into the receiver. The laugh startled me. Had I scored a funny without knowing it?

  “No, no. Nothing of the kind. The paperwork is taking longer to process because of your birthdate.”

  “My birthdate? Was my birthday a bad day for people in general?”

  “Not for you,” she replied. “For someone else, yes. They probably wish they had never been born. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you’ll understand because you’re a writer. You might say there is someone out there who is the shadow of you, if you know what I mean. A dark shadow.”

  “That’s sad,” I interjected. “I mean, what
could a person do that would put them into that kind of situation?”

  “You’d be surprised. In my line of work … well, you’d be surprised. Sad for him. You see we have to make sure you are not him.” I was intrigued by the circularity of her argument. “I know that sounds odd. But you could be him.”

  “What would make me him or him me?”

  “You were not only born on the same day, and in the same hospital, but at the same time of day. That’s what the records say. You could be him, and until we prove you are not him … so you’ll have to wait until we prove you are not him.”

  I wanted to sing a chorus of that old song “I Gotta Be Me,” but thought better of it. Sarcasm isn’t a crowd-pleaser with police people. Back when I wasn’t diabetic and had a driver’s licence, I got pulled over by a patrolman who leaned down to my window and asked me, without saying please, to produce my license. I pulled it out of my back-pocket wallet and presented it with both hands, as if he was a Japanese business man. He snapped it out of my fingers.

  “Was I going too fast?”

  “You were five kilometers over the limit.” He walked back to his cruiser and called in my name and plates. I wasn’t who he thought I was. I was clean. As he sauntered back to my car, jacking up his trousers from the belt and adjusting his sun glasses so he looked completely official, an essay by Michel de Montaigne I taught my students in a composition class flashed into my head.

  “No officer of the law is successful without someone to break the law.”

  The point Montaigne was making was that the world needs things to go wrong in order for things to go right. There is a balance to everything. Good keeps evil in check.