Writing and Other Occupations of Questionable Value...
I love to write. I love to write books with complex characters. Most of my characters find themselves in situations that require some soul searching, or nearly impossible conundrums that may or may not break them. Some of my characters come from challenging backgrounds, some are reluctant criminals.
I was talking to Mark, my editor and a guy who is one of my Gang of Four, my inner circle. (Oddly, there are actually four guys in this group. Two are cousins). We were discussing the challenges of finding time to write quality blog pieces and continue work on the WIP book and work for food.
Mark, half joking and half dead-on correctly mentioned that maybe if I didn’t spend all my free time working on or thinking about how to fix my fleet of ancient cars I might have more time to write.
Writing is an odd process. It is one thing I truly enjoy, but I am a master at finding other stuff to do rather than sitting down and typing.
Part of the reason for doing this blog/newsletter stuff is to get you guys to read some of my books. Many are free or in the Kindle Unlimited library.
Long ago I gave up on the idea of getting rich from my work. I think some of my stuff is pretty good, but book marketing sucks and the American appetite seems to be more tuned to rehashes and sequels and prequels of stories that were not that groundbreaking from the start. “Star Wars”, “Planet of The Apes”, seven-thousand iterations of Batman, Superman, Spiderman… I’m actually kind of waiting for a TV spinoff of a 21st Century “My Mother the Car.” FYI, if you’ve never endured that show, you should check it out, it’s truly horrible. It’s not uninspired, it’s just bad.
Mark and I realized that I have almost nine years of books and blogs and essays out there to choose from. I’m going to start posting some of them, and selections from some books. This will give me more time to work on my cars, damn; I mean more time to write!
Here is a piece that no one has read. It’s a character from The Three Lives Of Richie O’Malley who still has a lot of miles left in him… This guy will probably be the main character in my next book.
A Sample of I Never Made It Back Home:
A Black Dirt Farm, Upstate NY—1960s
An ancient 1937 Chevy pickup with a wooden flatbed drives a narrow path alongside a field of onions, their shiny green tops swaying in the afternoon sun like ocean waves in the breeze. The bed of the truck is missing a few boards and the stink of gasoline exhaust mixes with the stink of sweat and the stink of chemicals that have saturated the rich black dirt for many, many summers. The truck is filled to overflowing with migrant farm hands and empty wooden fruit baskets and a beaten to death Coke cooler, still mostly red with white letters and filled with ice and Ballantine beers. Slowly they snake along the dusty path that by someone’s standard passes as a road. At times, the truck comes precariously close to driving into the wide and snake filled drainage ditches that line each field. When you are bent over and weeding by hand in the ninety-degree sun, the endless rows of Orange County onions each seem one-hundred miles long. The hot morning’s humidity rises off the black expanse of fields. Dirt the color of coal and tall green onions rise and run as far as the eye can see in any direction. Soon the air will almost sizzle in the sun.
The truck stops and the farmhands jump off, causing small clouds of dry black dust to rise and cover shoes and dungarees. A woman emerges from the cab of the Chevy. She wears dirty work boots, dirty white socks and a cotton dress, faded and a threadbare sky blue. A boy about three years old sits in the cab next to the man.
The woman, smiling and speaking Spanish with an odd accent, gathers her crew around her. As the sun inches higher in the sky, you can feel it’s going to be one of those summer days where the air hits eighty before 7am and keeps going. The woman and crew join hands and say a quick prayer before each of them take an onion row, bending down and beginning their task.
The woman, Estelle, is first generation American-Polish, as is her husband Nicolas. People call him Micky. The boy is named Vincent. Micky and the small boy climb from the cab. An older Mexican man, named Enrique with heavily creased dark brown leather skin, evidence of too many years in the hot sun, joins them. The men rest their forearms on the wooden flatbed. The boy picks up small half rotted onions and throws them down the path and into the ditch.
Enrique pulls a dirty yellow and blue bandana from his dungaree back pocket and says, “Too early for the piwa, Micky. But soon enough my boys will want some of that cold Ballantine on this hot day!”
Mickey turns; both men look down the long rows of onions as the crew picks each individual weed and tosses it into a bag. At the end of the row, the bag is emptied into the ditches.
Enrique comments, “Your wife, Miss Estelle, she starts every field we work with a prayer, and she works as hard as any two men.”
Mickey smiles. “She is tough and kind. That’s how I want the world to see my boy,” and the tall thin man rustles the boy's hair.
Enrique, looking across the field, says, “Mr. Mickey, you and your wife, you are good to us, you never call us ‘wets,’ you don’t curse at us. You work right alongside us. That means a lot, sir. More than you know.”
“My family, and my wife’s family, Enrique, we came from immigrants like you. From Poland, both our families saw what the Nazis did to people and their lives. I never want to see that again. I want a better world for my boy and your children and grandchildren too. We are not so different, you and I, we come from hard work and discipline and good, god-fearing people. I don’t want our kids to have to work this hard.”
Mickey died later that fall, after the onion harvest was in, after Enrique and his crew followed the harvest south and back into Texas. An early autumn snowstorm blanketed Route #1 in north Jersey in a squall of ice and heavy snow. The B61 Thermodyne Mack and trailer full of onions jumped a small guardrail and careened down a mountainside. Mickey was ejected from the cab and found split open over a sharp stone. Estelle kept the farm going. Enrique and his family came back from Texas saddened to hear the news, but Estelle was a tough, driven woman. The farm and her boy was all she had.
Four years passed before she would allow a gentleman to ask her on a date. A man appeared about this time, 1964. He seemed kind enough at the outset. He was cold and distant to the boy. Vincent didn’t like him much. In 1966 the man, who Vincent only ever called Mr. Gentile, married Estelle. Mr. Gentile was a farmer too with his own fields a few miles away on the other side of the county known as the drowned lands. Vincent didn’t like Mr. Gentile. The man would often slap the boy if he misbehaved or talked back. In 1967 he became the boy's father, but the boy refused to take the man’s last name. None of this, from his father's death to his mother's re-marriage to his adoption, set well with the boy. Vincent acted out his anger in school. Daily starting fights with the other kids. The school would call the house at night. The phone call would result in a beating at the hand of Mr. Gentile. One day, Vincent struck back. The result of his defense was something near carnage. Mr. Gentile caned the boy so severely in the face and head Vincent lost sight in one eye. Soon after this, Estelle stopped praying. She stopped going to church. Enrique, just back in Orange County from Texas, expressed his concerns to Mr. Gentile, who informed the farmhand that his wife and her well-being was of no concern to some ‘fucking wetback.’ The tone of life on that farm had changed and turned dark. It died it seemed with Mickey that night in the B Model Mack.
Estelle became very ill and passed away later that spring, just as the onion tops were starting to break through the rich black soil.
Vincent lived on the farm, as Mr. Gentile’s son, until the summer of that same year 1969, before killing him one night in his sleep.
His original plan was to strangle the man by hand and watch him die, but he decided a shot gun was a surer thing. He walked into the room where his stepfather slept, almost breaking into a sweat each time a floorboard creaked in the quiet darkness. Vincent looked out the bedroom window and marveled to himself how beautiful was the expanse of green onion tops waving in the soft evening breeze, how the onion tops almost sparkled and danced in the moonlight.
Standing a good distance away, by the door frame, probably fifteen feet from the bed where Mr. Gentile slept on his side facing the boy, Vincent aimed the double barrel. The intent was to waken the man in searing pain and make sure he saw the young boy's face before killing him.
The first blast was a gut shot that woke the sleeping man screaming and wincing and holding his belly. Mr. Gentile’s blood soaked the sheets. He stared at the young boy as he held his stomach and intestines in. The boy smiled and said, “Not bad for half-blind, huh?”
Vincent let Mr. Gentile lay there bleeding and crying and begging him to go get help for most of the night. If the man started to scream, Vincent would bash him in the head with the butt of the shotgun, not enough to knock him out. Just enough to hurt. About four in the morning, a little before sunrise, he said “Don’t worry, Mr. Gentile, I won’t blind you. I want you to see the kill shot coming.”
Finally, Vincent raised the barrel of the gun from his lap, pointed the barrel at Mr. Gentile's face, dropped the gun one last time, and carried it closer to the bed. “Do you believe in God, Mr. Gentile?” The weakened and bleeding man whispered a soft, “Yes, boy I do.” Vincent put the barrel an inch from the man's face and said, “Well, fuck you and the god that made you!” He squeezed the trigger. A large chunk of the man’s skull bounced off the bedroom wall.
Vincent busied himself going through dresser drawers taking jewelry, the man’s wallet, cash he found in an old shoe box. He took the watch from the dead man’s wrist and a St Christopher’s medal from around his neck. He found some jewelry of his mom’s and he carefully put that in a separate box. The thought crossed his mind to set the house on fire, but he decided he’d let the man rot. Vincent would be long gone by the time the body was found.
Walking from the house with his clothes and the spoils from Mr. Gentile’s room and the rest of his earthly possessions in grocery store bags, he walked toward the farm’s ‘37 Chevy pickup. In the early morning light, he saw Enrique was awake and outside his trailer with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. The older man smiled and waved at Vincent. The boy joined the farm foreman in the cool morning air and approaching dawn. Enrique went inside and emerged with a second cup of coffee for the boy. The man asked, “Are you ok, young Vincent? It looks like you are taking a trip. I heard some noise up in the house. I was worried the old man was beating you again.”
Vincent looked at Enrique and said, “For the first time since mama died, I am alright.” Vincent thanked the older man for the coffee and said, “I need the truck and I’d appreciate if you’d say you’ve not seen me;”
Enrique smiled a sad grin and said, “Seen who?”
With that, the boy turned away, climbed into the old pickup with the dangling FARM license plate on the back, shifted it into gear and left the black dirt life behind him.
You can download the kindle for FREE here or its free on Kindle Unlinited
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