Good New! It WILL happen.

The novel Jesse Lives will be serialized in a weekly free magazine being distributed in the San Francisco Bay area starting in August called People's Art Lit To Go. I'll begin posting bigger sections on the blog in reasonable coordination with the paper version coming out. So come on back in August. Or move to the SF Bay area just so you can access the free mag. (No, please don't. I wouldn't want to be responsible for such a move even if the SF Bay area is a fine place to live.)

[delay due to possible publication]

[Just a note to anyone reading this blog on a regular basis. I have stopped for a few days because a possibility of having the novel serialized in a publication has arisen. As soon as I know whether this will happen or not, and if it is, whether it is OK with them that I continue the slower serialization here, I will begin posting pages again.]

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 10

“Ye….s…s…s?” you would say, drawing it out long in your best imitation of a know-it-all psychiatrist.
 
OK, here’s the secret. Most folks think that real designers start from scratch and don’t borrow any ideas from anyone else. That would be plagiarism, right? But it’s not so. The human arm is the human arm. It’s more or less the shape of a tube, attached at one end, and capable of bending in the middle. So any sleeve must be some variation on a cylinder that accomodates bending if it is beyond a certain length. The basic shape is defined for you. There are only so many variations on that shape, and most of them have names. However, the designer does have unlimited choice regarding the material the cylinder will be made of, how much wider than the arm the cylinder will be at various points, how long or short the cylinder will be, and how it will be decorated.
 
Now, say you’re making your dress from one of those patterns you buy in a fabric shop. You get the right size pattern, but you might adjust some of the pieces to fit yourself better, if you know how. Or you might adjust some aspects of the pattern to show off your good parts and hide your bad parts. Are you designing? It depends on the extent of the changes you make. If your finished dress can still be recognized as coming from that pattern, probably not. But there comes a point when it can’t. And at that point, you’re designing.

And even before I moved to New York, I’d done that. Besides being a scientist, I had been making custom-designed and fit sweaters. I’d even had one in a catalogue, but I’d underpriced it rediculously and driven myself crazy working a rediculous amount of hours for almost no pay. I wanted to know how to do that in a way that would pay, if such a thing was possible. And in meeting Rosa, I thought I’d just met someone who knew.

That Monday morning, as I approached the subway station, I was thinking about Rosa and kicking myself for a good number of things. I was so lost in thought that I walked right past Jesse and found myself at the bottom of the steps. Usually, locating a token in my coin purse required

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 9

what I hated more than anything else was identifying myself as a scientist. Every time that inevitable question came up, I cringed. If I admitted I was a scientist, a research scientist, a biochemist, two things happened.
 
First, the person that I was talking to labeled me with every stereotype he or she held regarding scientists, thus reaching several false conclusions regarding what sort of person I was. (This often resulted in some sort of stilted conversation regarding the area of my research in which neither of us was really very interested.)
 
Second, even though it was true, I was a scientist, and I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to come to New York if I hadn’t been, I felt like a liar. This was a corrulary of the first effect. I felt I’d just claimed to be a whole lot of things I wasn’t, and at the same time, I felt like I’d betrayed myself in passing up a chance to claim a single thing I really was (or wanted to be).
 
So what was it that I wanted to be able to claim to be? (Oh, the irony!) A designer. Yes, the same person who didn’t have the nerve to state a design opinion in the presence of a “real designer” wanted to be one. You may say “Yes, and I want to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but that’s not going to happen,” and you’d be right. But you’d be wrong as well, because I already was a designer. That was another thing I didn’t know yet.
 
I can just hear you saying to yourself “Oh yeah, I bet she fit right in among all those other mildly insane folks she’s been jabbering on about.” I can’t blame you, unless perhaps you’re a designer, too. Perhaps you don’t know it?

Let me convince you. (Of course, I never would have had the nerve to say any of this to you had we actually met, but I’m very convincing when I’m talking to imaginary folks.) “A designer designs,” I would say, sagely.

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 8

“Lisa,” I said, introducing myself. Jesse winced. Apparently he didn’t think the name fitted me. Either that or maybe he’d pricked himself on a thorn. “Is that really a dress you designed yourself?”
 
“It is.” Rosa had an English accent. “But I think I might add a rose brooch,” she smiled at Jesse. “Right here.” She held it on the left shoulder on the edge of the neckline and turned to me. “What do you think? Never hurts to add on a little bonus for the customer.”
 
Imagine that! In New York less than a month and I was being asked by a real live designer for an opinion on the placement of a brooch on a designer dress! I was so impressed with myself, I could hardly get a word out. And I was so afraid of saying something stupid that I didn’t dare express my true opinion. (I would have placed the rose on the waistline.) I wimped out. “I think you’re the designer,” I said.
 
“Me,” said Jesse, “I’d add the rose, yes. But I’d make it kind of sparkly. Make it detachable, and they can put it wherever they like. Folks like customizing things.” (Wish I’d said that, I thought.)
 
“Jesse,” said Rosa, “your genius is wasted on this corner.” She paid for her rose and went on down into the station. I paid for my six and went on to the newsstand. Jesse continued to hawk his wares.

The earth whirled around twice, dressed better than any of us, and it was Monday again.
 
Chapter 3.

At that point in time, I was earning my living as a scientist, a research scientist. It sounds impressive, prestigious, important. There are any number of fine adjectives you can attach to it. But my heart wasn’t in it. I resented having to pass up affordable theater tickets because something in the lab had to be attended to in the evening. (Sometimes I even scheduled experiments around other activities). I hated the jargon. I hated the atmosphere of competition and criticism. I hated giving lectures. But

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 7

“Michael, Jane. Isn’t new love grand? How about a rose or two to celebrate it?”
 
“Johnnie-boy! How’d you get you a fine woman like Sarah? Bet you brought her flowers, right? Just about time you sealed the deal, don’t you think? Right, Sarah? How about a rose?”
 
“Hey Sharleen! Hasn’t Joe’s bought you a rose every Saturday for a month now? How about buying him one?”
 
“How about a rose, Miss Claudie? There’s no shame in buying yourself roses.”
 
“I’ll take half a dozen if you tell me how it is that you speak German.”
 
“How it is? I speak it badly, that’s how. Learned a bit of it when I was in the army. Of course, I’ve forgotten most of it now. Louisa! Won't this pink rose’ll look grand on your new dress?”
 
The woman he had addressed as Louisa was alone. “Jesse,” she said (Now I knew his name!) “how do you do that?” She took the rose Jesse offered and held it against her dress, appraising her reflection in the nearest store window. “It does look good at that.”
 
“Louisa, I don’t know how I do it. I just look. You walk different when you’ve got a new dress on I guess, especially one you designed.” My jaw dropped. The street vendor I had hesitated to associate with was introducing me to a real fashion designer! Seeing the look on my face, Jesse added “Louisa’s a designer at Halston’s. Miss Louisa, this is Miss Claudie. She’s new around here.”
 
“Rosa, actually,” the woman said, offering her hand. “Only Jesse calls me Louisa.”
 
“Another old song,” Jesse murmured.

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 6

Chapter 2.

A few weeks after the time he brought me the token, after I had paid him back and begun paying thirty cents each day for my used Times, I arrived at the subway stop to find him conversing with a group of tourists in German. It was by no means perfect German. His accent lent his German a softness it generally lacked, and his word order and grammar were faulty. Many times he groped for words, miming and using his hands while watching the tourists to see if they understood. The Germans suggested words, both German and English, and with a lot of effort on all sides, communication was being accomplished. It was a lot better than I could have done with my two years of college German.

He spotted me and waved a Times. “Miss Claudie! Miss Claudie! Help me out, will you? These folks want to go to Times Square. Will you show them where to get the shuttle at 42nd?”

How could I not? How could I not do more? I got them a map at the token window. I showed them the route they would be taking. I got off at 42nd and walked them to the shuttle. (I did it all without speaking a word of German, I realized afterward.) I acted just like the West Virginian I was. And I felt proud of it. I decided that in this one respect, if nothing else, I would be true to my roots. I would help out any and all tourists I came upon needing help (especially Europeans). They, if no one else, would think of me as a real New Yorker, after all.

I resolved to ask Jesse his name (I still didn’t know his name yet) and to ask him how he came to speak German. and that weekend I had my chance. I headed out Saturday evening to buy the Sunday Times which becomes available in Manhattan usually around seven the evening before. Jesse didn’t deal in the Sunday Times. Those who bought it discarded it section by section, and there were sometime nine or more sections. Yet there he was outside the subway. He seemed to have diversified his business. Now he was selling roses, one by one, to the couples that passed in and out of the station, sounding as if he knew the history of each couple.

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 5

Wasn’t I thoroughly trained to display such friendly kindness myself? Even if I did have to admit that I did it with nowhere near Jesse’s grace? I had decided it just didn’t come natural to me. It should have. I had the full complement of Appalachian genes, as far as I knew. I could walk the walk and, try though I might, I apparently couldn’t help talking the talk. But, to my shame (because that is part of the training), the truth was that a good bit of my friendly kindness was fake. Surrounded by what I presumed to be the real thing all day long every day, I just got more and more irritated and more and more and more aware of my own duplicity. The better I got at fooling the rest of West Virginia, the worse I felt, because nobody knew “the real me”...except me, of course. And I didn’t like myself much.

One of my reasons for leaving home had been to get away from the necessity (as I saw it) of maintaining a false front. Another was to get away from the constant reproach (as I saw it) of constantly encountering those more virtuous than I.

But good habits die hard. Here I was in New York City, and all I had to do was to throw around “pleases” left and right like a trail of bread crumbs, and my past (in the form of Jesse) had found me. Apparently it been here all the time waiting for me for me to turn up. It was enough to make me laugh. Jesse’s friendly kindness was as genuine as his (and my) accent. I knew what had brought me here, but what in the world had brought him?

Despite myself, I was becoming more and more curious about Jesse. The more curious I became, the more I fought it. I hadn’t come to New York City to reaffirm my lack of sophistication. I had come to hide it long enough to gain the real thing. Then I hoped to procede onward to Europe. New York was a way station on the way there, a jumping off point, perhaps a test to see if I was worthy of going on.

Ruefully, I wondered if Jesse had ever been to Europe. It turned out he had.

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 4

been commenting on exactly the same thing that led me to notice him. We were both of southern country stock somehow transplanted to the big city and noticeably sticking out. Not only was he one of “my own”; I was one of his. There were few enough of us around that an encounter with another such transplant was, as we would say back home, “a sight for sore eyes”. Now I only had to decide what I thought of that. On one hand, I desperately did want to blend in. On the other hand, I hadn’t, as yet, a clue how to do it. Surely, I thought, this down and out street vendor wasn’t likely to have any useful advice for me.
 
That’s what I thought at the time. In actuality, he had already begun providing me with the best advice possible. I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.

The next day I tried to whisk past Jesse unnoticed. I rushed down the stairs to the turnstiles only to find that I was out of tokens. I had resigned myself to waiting on line at the token booth when Jesse appeared beside me offering a token. “You’ll miss the next train, Miss Claudie! Here! Someone paid me with a token earlier. You can pay me back tomorrow. Oh! And here’s your Times. See you tomorrow.” He disappeared back up the stairs before I could say anything, which was just as well, because I hadn’t the slightest notion what I would have said.

I was left standing there feeling ashamed of myself. By his unhesitating display of plain old down-home friendly kindness, Jesse had just given me a fine demonstration of what I had to offer New York City. What was so bad, really, about making my first friends among New Yorkers of a similar background, possibly homeless street vendors not excluded? A “real” New Yorker might call that mild insanity, but on that basis, my entire home state might as well be declared insane.

Jesse Lives! - Pg. 3

me the nickname “Miss Claudie”. “Saved a Times just for you, Miss Claudie,” he said one morning. “Yes, you. Every morning. ‘New York Times, please.’ Every morning. ‘Please.’ You were raised right.”
 
“Thank you,” I said, doubtfully. I didn’t know his name yet. “But what did you call me?”
 
“Miss Claudie, ‘cause you sure look good to me.” He said this with a shy smile, then cocked his head as if waiting for a response. I didn’t know what to say or do. He looked disappointed and added “It’s from an old song,” rather apologetically.
 
“Thank you again,” I said, hurriedly handing him a quarter and heading down the stairs.
 
I’ve been called plain. Well, to be truthful, I’ve been called worse than plain. In college, I was compared to Tiny Tim. The fuzzy-haired ukelele player, not the Dickens character. I’ve had adolescent boys fight not to end up in the seat next to me, and I’ve been pointed at by small children.

It’s a burden, but I bear it lightly since a side effect is that any positive male attention I receive is not based on my looks. I’m not rich either. Between my looks and my poverty, I have natural immunity to most of the male “toads” of the world, and I’m left with mostly princes to choose from. There are few enough of these, but they are generally worth spending time with. I have no complaints.
 
That being said, I had had little experience dealing with compliments on the order of the one I had just been handed. I had had particularly little experience dealing with such compliments from strangers. In my experience, such compliments had tended to be either mocking (“There’s a girl for you, Henry. Ain’t she a beauty? Go for it, Henry!”) or patronizing (“So this is your daughter. Isn’t she pretty! Takes after you, doesn’t she? I’ll bet you have tons of boyfriends, right?”) Jesse’s compliment was evidently sincere and it had me completely flummoxed.
 
All day long at work my thoughts strayed to the brief encounter. What had I missed? Had I handled it badly? Finally, I figured it out. Jesse had

Jesse Lives Pg.2

establishment or the other “No meat on the floor!”
 
These folks served as ice-breakers for the rest of us. We stared at them out of the corners of our eyes, then made eye contact with a nearby fellow “sane” person and, perhaps, began a conversation. “Doesn’t she live in the building on 83rd with the art deco entrance? The one with the doorman who’s always hosing down the sidewalk?”
 
“I think so. That doorman’s as crazy as she is. You know that scrawny eucalypsus tree out in front of the building? I saw him attack a Chinese delivery boy who dared to lock his bicycle to it. Hosed him down like he does the sidewalk, and this was last November. The poor kid was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and didn’t speak a word of English.”
 
“He may have recognized the kid as one of those who leaves the leaflets all around. I live in 342 just down the street, and we end up with all the leaflets from his building clogging up the gutters in front of our building because he washes then down in our direction.”
 
“Oh. Is that a good building, 342?....”

And so it went. A new acquaintance made, perhaps someone to run in the park with or share a cab with if need be, someone to suggest a repairman or a mover or a dry cleaner. The quality of life in New York City is dependent on such exchanges of information, and as stimulators of such exchanges, people like the turning lady, the restaurant inspector, and the tree-obsessed doorman could be credited with contributing to that quality of life.
 
Jesse, as I discovered in time, did not really belong in the same category as these. He belonged (and belongs) in a category of his very own, Jesse did (does), but I’m getting ahead of myself, and there are things, gentle reader, that I must keep to myself, for now, as I promised Jesse I would.
 
In any case, as I have said, in my ignorant arrogance, I placed Jesse in the category of the “mildly insane”, and was thus rather wary when he first began to address me as an individual, apparently bestowing upon

Jesse Lives - Page 1

The purpose of this blog is to edit the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo, which I think has definite potential. My plan is to post a page a day, though I may forget or not be able to do that (on vacation, for example) some days. By the time of the next NaNoWriMo, I should have this one edited. Here we go. Comments are welcome.

P. 1

When I first moved to New York City from Virginia in the mid-eighties, it took a while for me to sort out faces that repeated from the circulating crowd and begin to recognize my neighbors. In Jesse’s case, it wasn’t a repeating face, but a repeating voice and the associated accent, so close to my own, that eventually registered. Appalachian accents were not common.
 
Recognizing one of “my own”, I sought out the owner of the voice and found it belonged to an old man who stood by the entry of the 86th St. subway station each morning reselling newspapers discarded by earlier users of the station. I discovered much later that Jesse was only a little over 50 at the time, but my initial impression was of a man of at least 60, perhaps more, hard-lived years.
 
He did not have the look of the hard-core homeless. His eyes were clear, his clothes clean (if well-worn), he was always clean-shaven, and he never begged. He just offered his wares, calling out the headlines of the various papers in a strong clear voice conveying no judgement on the reliability of the source. The headlines of The Enquirer or The Star (“Baby Fathered by Alien Can Fly” or “Elvis Sighted in El Paso”) received the same matter-of-fact delivery as those of the Times or the Wall Street Journal. He managed to give the impression that he believed them all equally and without question, despite their tendency to be contradictory, and this was why I initially placed him in the same category as the other mildly insane folks inhabiting the area.
 
There was a very well-dressed, impeccably groomed woman who would often stop in the middle of the sidewalk to perform elaborate rituals, turning around three times rapidly, removing and replacing her hat, turning around again, reaching down to touch the sidewalk, turning around three times more, again removing and replacing her hat, then continuing on her way as if everyone did such things
 
And there was the "restaurant inspector", official or not I never knew, who could be heard fairly often bellowing from inside one es