16
September 15, 1940
Dear Max, (he wrote)
Somewhere way over the South China sea or the Indian Ocean as I write this. We left six p.m. Tokyo time, it must be four a.m. (that damned Fats Waller has kept everybody up all night with his piano playing!) (just kidding!) The Olympics, as I told you last letter (but this might beat it there), were great. Watched Sunpei Uto set a new 100 meter freestyle record (better than Tarzan’s). Since Owens wasn’t there, we lost all the dash events in track but won some distance (!) races—an American that can run more than a mile—unheard of in the 1930s! I’m sure you read all this in the papers—will tell you all about them when I get back in November.
Saw Scott F. in L.A. before I came over—has he written you?—he looks bad, Max (don’t tell him I said that). He’s writing some college movie for Columbia (he wrote a Republic Western under a pen name a few months ago)—when are they going to stop thinking of him as a freshman?—he’s in his forties. He tried to get me to stay in Hollywood and write (“just till you get your health back, Tom—lots of money to be made here”). I told him I wouldn’t have any health at all if I had to write for the little tin kings out there. Scott also says, “To hell with Technocracy! I want to go into a bar in broad daylight and get drunk again.”
It’s not that way on this zep, Max. It flows like water. I’m glad you got me to take it, back in June when I was planning the Olympic trip. Smoother than a liner—we should already have come over 800 miles. Like riding in a fast hotel.
Did I tell you I watched the Olympics some on tele-vision? I know they have it at the World’s Fair—but not like Japan. They wanted to keep the locals away from Olympic Stadium, so they broadcast it all over Japan—big department stores, town halls, etc. Saved most of the seats for the tourists. We’re way behind them in the field of tele-vision. Tell Howard Scott that I said so next time you see him. Tell him to get his crackedest Technocrats on RCA’s butt about it.
By the way, ask the accountant to make sure that if my U.S. Inc. shares get put in with my royalties, to turn them back in to my bank account (cashed!) please. I forgot to leave him a note before I left.
Harry and Caresse Crosby were supposed to be on the trip—but nobody’s seen them. They either missed the zep, or maybe even never made it to Japan, or are in their cabin jazzing (Xcuse my French)—they saw Lindbergh land at Le Bourget, remember?—now everybody and his dog are zipping around the world in dirigibles (god, I’m beginning to sound like Fitzgerald!).
I think I saw the Columbiad below us a while ago. You can check the shipping tables and see if I’m hallucinating, or what, Max. Had to be. Looked like Philadelphia in a canoe. Or have they turned out another one since I left? (There I go again.)
This letter seemed important when I started it, now it just seems like a letter. Am looking forward to the rest of the trip—tomorrow (today) I get to take the tour. The Other Wolfe would have waxed poetic about it, the grandeur, the size, the mystery of all this, the zep, the people, their baggage, weighing less than this pen I’m writing with (Somebody told me the pilots like to take off with the whole thing weighing about 200 pounds—something to do with the engines.) Once I would have waxed poetic, now I’m lucky if I can wax my shoes. (Sorry.)
Hear the German guy Hesse did a great job. Did you send Rohwolt the galleys of Child By Tiger (I’m sure you did) so they can start on that? O, Lost and T.A.T. River had great translations, everybody tells me H.B. Pentland (called—I forget what—Die Alpen Forever or some-thing) is even better than those. In German I mean. Am looking forward to the six weeks with Miss Voelker more than anyone knows. (She said she was writing you, but is ashamed of her English, which is better than mine, Max. Did she?)
Wolfe sat up and stretched his arms, rubbing his left shoulder. He looked toward the window. He couldn’t tell if it was getting light, or what he saw was just the airglow off the ship’s silver skin.
Now I’m tired Max, so will write more this afternoon. Will tell you all about the passenger list, starting with Herr Bock, Docteur Canard and Monsieur le Coq, and ascending upward to me. Also various other etceteras.
For now,
Tom
Wolfe lay naked on the bunk, orange in the glow from the nightlight. He smoked a last tired cigarette, stubbed it out in the weighted conical ashtray he’d taken off the desk and placed on the floor. There was a dull, not unpleasant throb on the deck. He put his hand up against the wall; it was there too. It must be there all the time, the tension of their passage through the air, the smooth vibrations of the engines against the structure of the ship. It was a calming thing.
He lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the bottom of the unused bunk above him.
He was more than half a mile in the air, hurtling through the sky at nearly a hundred miles an hour, and he’d been listening to a band playing jazz as if he were in a Manhattan basement. He had never felt safer or more secure in his life.
He turned sideways, to face the dim light. All the familiar things were around him—his pen on the desk, his battered briefcase, his shoes and socks.
And the nightlight; grinning, confident, like President Scott in a pair of baggy shorts. Wolfe closed his eyes.
Into the future, then, reeking of celluloid and Bakelite though it may be, with Mickey Mouse lighting the way.
Cabin in the Sky
The passengers in the salon felt as if they had been beaten with thousand-pound feathers most of the night. Fats took another drink from his bottle, looked at it, finished it.
He’d taken off the derby hat and the garter. His shirt was transparent, wet.
The band had quit two hours before, completely worn out. They’d packed up their instruments, left the stage, now sat at tables, watching, marveling, not believing the man. Not many people noticed they’d gone.
There was a sleeping child at one of the front tables. She began to wake up.
“Here’s somethin’ I should have played first,” said Waller. “Way back when I started tonight.”
He ran a bunch of high tinkling trills with his right hand, and in a high voice began singing “Cabin in the Sky.”
He finished. The forty or fifty passengers left broke into applause.
He glanced out the door where he could get an angle on a window. The sky seemed paler, the stars beginning to fade.
He looked at the child who’d awakened. Her eyes were puffy as she rubbed them with her sleeve.
“Whose baby child is that?” he asked, pointing. The woman at the next table said, “Mine.” “Well, Ol’ Fats is gonna sing one song, just for her, then he wants you to take her and put her in her little bitty bunk bed, and then come on back. But this one’s gonna be for you, darlin’,” he said, pointing to the girl. “You can help me sing it if you want to.”
A man at another table looked at his Cartier wristwatch as Fats began the bass notes.
“Never mind the hour!” he said to the man, “I got the power!”
He started in, and they all—the little girl, her mother, the passengers, the band members, the crew—all joined in, shaking off their lethargy and sleepiness, as he began singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
You Could Go Home Again
Appendix: “A Musical Interlude”
This is a list of the music on the tapes I made and listened to while I was writing “You Could Go Home Again.” You might want to make your own version. This fits on both sides of a 90-minute cassette and half a 60-minute one. You’ll notice it’s not all contemporary (either the music itself, like the Dylan, or the performer, like ’30s music played by ’60s neo-jug and jazz bands). What I was aiming at was a mood, something either to get me butt-jumping in my chair, or to calm me down. Besides, there’s lots of good music here.
1. “The Joint is Jumpin’”—Fats W
aller
2. “Gonna Sit Right Down (and Write Myself a Letter)”—Fats Waller
3. “Mood Indigo”—Jim Kweskin Jug Band
4. “The Sheik of Araby”—Jim Kweskin Jug Band
5. “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie”—Fats Waller
6. “Titanic”—Snaker Dave Ray & Spider John Koerner (they have it going the wrong way . . .)
7. “Ukelele Lady”—Jim Kweskin Jug Band
8. “Christopher Columbus”—Jim Kweskin Jug Band
9. “Your Feets Too Big”—Fats Waller
10. “My Blue Heaven”—Fats Domino
11. “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”—Fats Waller
12. “Mississippi”—Turk Murphy Jazz Band
13. “Shipwreck Blues”—Bessie Smith
14. “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”—Stampfel & Weber
15. “Corrina, Corrina”—Bob Dylan
16. “In The Mood”—Henhouse Five Plus Two (chickens do Miller)
17. “Aloha ka Manini”—Gabby Pahanui
18. “The Sheik of Araby”—Leon Redbone
19. “Emperor Norton’s Hunch”—Queen City Jazz Band
20. “Bethena Walltzes”—Queen City Jazz Band
21. “Shine on Harvest Moon”—Leon Redbone
22. “Phonograph Blues”—Robert Johnson
23. “Willow Weep For Me”—Billy Holiday
24. “Mr. Jelly Roll Baker”—Leon Redbone
25. “Hang out The Stars in Indiana”—New Mayfair Dance Orchestra
26. “After You’ve Gone”—Queen City Jazz Band
27. “If We Ever Meet Again This Side of Heaven”—Leon Redbone
28. “Ain’t Misbehavin’”—Fats Waller
29. “Black Diamond Bay”—Bob Dylan
30. “Yellow Submarine”—The Beatles
31. “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”—Donovan
32. “Mississippi Rag”—Turk Murphy Jazz Band
33. “Gonna Sit Right Down (and Write Myself a Letter)” Fats Waller (again)
34. “There Goes My Baby”—The Drifters
35. “Sea Cruise”—Frankie Ford
36. “Sincerely”—The Moonglows
37. “Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight”—The Spaniels
AFTERWORD
Growing up, I knew everything (from what was available at the time I could get my hands on) about certain writers. I’d read their works, become fascinated by them, read biographies and critical works etc. They were, pretty much in order: Edgar Rice Burroughs; Robert E. Howard; H.P. Lovecraft; Thomas Wolfe; James Agee; Eugene O’Neill.
I’d always wanted to write a story about Wolfe (1900-1938). Norman Mailer once said, “Wolfe wrote like the greatest 17-year-old who ever lived.” A few years later when the essay was reprinted, he provided a footnote: “I meant 15-year-old.”
Wolfe’s stuff used to speak to the young (when the young still read). Every writer has a Wolfe story in them, and usually wrote it (Bradbury did “Forever and the Earth.”)
One of the problems of writing a Wolfe story is that they all think they have to write like Wolfe, which was practically impossible in the past, and must be more-so today.
Also, people who’ve written stories about Wolfe surviving his 1938 ordeal in Seattle and at Johns Hopkins always tried to make him the pre-illness Wolfe of logorrheic torrents, gargantuan appetites and world-striding gait, without taking into account the effects of tuberculosis of the brain, and the state of brain surgery in the late 1930s.
What I wanted to do was to try to imagine him as he would have been had he lived through that: I figured he’d be trying to find himself afterwards, just like he’d been trying to find the real America before.
I’d also wanted to write about Technocracy for a long time: (I think the only other story ever set in a world where Technocracy had come true was Mack Reynolds’ “Speakeasy” in the early 1960s.)
It was a movement started by Howard Scott in the early 1930s, before Roosevelt’s election—supposedly when things totally collapsed in the De-pres-sion (was the thinking) which looked like it would happen any day now under Hoover, the Technocrats (engineers and scientists, mostly) would step in, reapportion goods and services on a meaningful scientific basis—from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity—keep the railroads running etc.—I’m simplifying; but it was an all-encompassing system of social reform based on something other than straight capitalism which had gotten the world in the mess it was in. Technocracy had quite a vogue from about 1931-1933, when the New Deal mugged and kidnapped some of its best ideas. (The last vestige of it was when the Post Office adopted the ZIP code in 1964.)
Technocracy now remains as a sort of charming reminder of those long-dead Depression Thirties. If you’ve ever seen the Our Gang comedy The Kid From Borneo, there’s a scene where Spanky (who thinks an escaped Wild Man from Borneo is his “Uncle George” and who wants to eat him—whereas the Wild Man only wants to eat everything else in the kitchen) is cornered up on the kitchen counter and tries to make conversation to get Uncle George’s mind off cannibalism:
Spanky: How are things in Borneo?
“Uncle George” (busy with a ten pound ham): Yum yum eatem up, eatem up.
Spanky: Yeah, I guess things are tough all over. Have you heard about Technocracy?
Once again I have various writers doing cameo appearances (like in the movie of Around the World in 80 Days [1956]).
There’s Wolfe front and center of course. Nevil Shute and T.E. Lawrence settle in for a nice conversation (under their real, or assumed names). And then there’s Jerry.
Hard as it is to believe, the most reclusive American writer of the 20th Century was once the assistant social director on the Bremerhaven, or one of those luxury liners that plied the Atlantic every week between the Wars. His father, a meat importer, sent Jerome David over to Europe to check on things in 1939; he worked out his passage both ways as the assistant social director. (He was a whiz at ping-pong.)
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
Wolfe was at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, He would have been at the 1940 ones in Tokyo had not his death, and WWII intervened (in our world).
Well, I wanted a better world than that. (I also kept forgetting to put in some sports figures from John R. Tunis’ The Iron Duke and The Iron Duke Returns, about the ’36 Olympics, forgotten boys’ sports novels. It’s too late now. This thing is set in concrete.)
I wrote this in July of 1991. It was published in a beautiful edition of 200 or so, by Cheap St. Press in November 1993. I later sold it to Omni Online for the Neon Visions series (sponsored by Chrysler) for the biggest check I’ve ever gotten for less than a book-length work. The money allowed me to move (in May 1995) with everything I owned (except 8 boxes of books) and $600 cash in an ’85 Toyota Tercel wagon to Washington state, where I wrote, fished and didn’t eat very well for the next eight years. I was sometimes happy as a clam. Most often, not.
(For more on Cheap St. and George and Jan O’Nale, see the afterword to “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” in Things Will Never Be The Same, vol. 1 of Selected Fiction.)
FLATFEET!
1912
Captain Teeheezal turned his horse down toward the station house just as the Pacific Electric streetcar clanged to a stop at the intersection of Sunset and Ivar.
It was just 7:00 a.m. so only three people got off at the stop. Unless they worked at one of the new moving-picture factories a little further out in the valley, there was no reason for someone from the city to be in the town of Wilcox before the stores opened.
The motorman twisted his handle, there were sparks from the overhead wire, and the streetcar belled off down the narrow tracks. Teeheezal watched it recede, with the official sign No Shooting Rabbits f
rom the Rear Platform over the back door.
“G’hup, Pear,” he said to his horse. It paid no attention and walked at the same speed.
By and by he got to the police station. Patrolman Rube was out watering the zinnias that grew to each side of the porch. Teeheezal handed him the reins to his horse.
“What’s up, Rube?”
“Not much, Cap’n,” he said. “Shoulda been here yesterday. Sgt. Fatty brought by two steelhead and a Coho salmon he caught, right where Pye Creek empties into the L.A. River. Big as your leg, all three of ’em. Took up the whole back of his wagon.”
“I mean police business, Rube.”
“Oh.” The patrolman lifted his domed helmet and scratched. “Not that I know of.”
“Well, anybody in the cells?”
“Uh, lessee . . .”
“I’ll talk to the sergeant,” said Teeheezal. “Make sure my horse stays in his stall.”
“Sure thing, Captain.” He led it around back.
The captain looked around at the quiet streets. In the small park across from the station, with its few benches and small artesian fountain, was the big sign No Spooning by order of Wilcox P.D. Up toward the northeast the sun was coming full up over the hills.
Sgt. Hank wasn’t at his big high desk. Teeheezal heard him banging around in the squad room to the left. The captain spun the blotter book around.
There was one entry:
Sat. 11:20 p.m. Jimson H. Friendless, actor, of Los Angeles city, D&D. Slept off, cell 2. Released Sunday 3:00 p.m. Arr. off. Patrolmen Buster and Chester.
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 20
