TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 124
Tobie Shapiro
tobie at shpilchas.net
Thu Jan 18 07:57:39 PST 2007
January 18, 2000007
Dear One for All and All for One,
I'm taking a writing class every
Wednesday morning from 9:30 to 12:30. The
teacher is Andy Couturier (Ko-TOO-ree-ay). He is
wonderful. All the suffering I've done in other
writing classes is disappearing into this healing
experience. He wrote a book, "Writing Open the
Mind," in which he lays forth umpteen exercizes
to inspire the unconscious mind to take over the
pen. They are ingenious exercizes, fun to do,
fascinating even. His manner is all positive.
No one is allowed to hack into someone else's
work and say, "I didn't like it. It sucks." or
"The narrator is screwed, and you have no talent."
Yesterday, we shared some stories of past
abuses of critique. I retold the story of the
teacher in a novel writing class I took through
the University of California Extension. I can't
remember the teacher's name, which is an insult
to him in itself, but he was always cutting off
the students in mid sentence to say things like,
"But where's the action?" And they would stammer
and say that it came on the next page, or in the
next paragraph, and he'd smirk and say, "That's
what they all say. On the next page! It has to
come now!" and he'd dismiss the student and
call on someone else. The next someone else
would think that he or she would be lucky, and
begin to read, only to be interrupted a ways down
the road with a laugh about a grammatical snafu
or a turn of phrase that was clumsy. Then he
called on me. I was writing a novel about the
era in my life in which I was hooked on cocaine.
I read for a paragraph or so, and he interrupted
me sharply. "Why should we care about this
character?" and he dismissed me.
Another woman told the story of a chance
to pitch your novel to an agent. It was a whole
event. The agents sat in a row, and the lucky
pitchers waited in line for three minutes with
them. When it was her turn, she sat in the hot
chair and began talking about her memoir about
her mother who was a lesbian in the 1950s and was
given shock treatments to cure her of her
homosexuality. She got half way out of the first
sentence, and the agent said, "So what!" and
tossed her out. This stuff is supposed to make
us stronger. But why should we have to get
toughened up? It's not necessary. It's an
artificial construct, an excuse for sadists to do
what they do so well with impunity. Having been
tossed around by the music business as well as
the publishing business, I feel very strongly
about this. You really can show your humanity
and be helpful to nearly every person who crosses
your path if you are a person in a position of
power. Why not be helpful? Oh. 'Cause they
don't feel like it.
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October 20, 1991
I was reclining at the breakfast table, a
mug of good coffee in my hands. David had taken
the twins to Tilden Park to the Merry-Go-Round to
give me a break. My intention was to take a nap.
I hadn't had one for it seemed like years, maybe
the four and a half years since Meyshe and Feyna
had been born. It was a hot day, the hottest on
record, and at ten in the morning the
neighborhood wind chimes were all going off, a
high tinkling chorus of alarm. A mean north wind
had kicked up. A lone cardboard box blew down
the middle of the street, tumbling over itself,
unfolding. There was something haunting about
the day: something not right, something wicked,
in fact, Sunday morning, a bad mood in the air.
But of course that's in retrospect, holy
retrospect.
The phone rang and when I answered, it
was Yuri, Yvonne's son. He said, "Guess you guys
must be roasting up there." I asked him what he
meant, and he told me there was a fire, a big
fire, in the Oakland hills. Was it near me? I
got up and walked to the window, peered out and
saw a vibrantly blue sky with fluffy white clouds
ambling along. I said, "It looks fine out
there." He told me to look out another window,
and I turned ninety degrees to the western wall,
looked out the glass and saw a huge angry plume
of smoke, red at the base, black at the top,
billowing out of the hill beyond the houses.
I will never forget what I said to him:
"Oh my God, it's beautiful. I hope it's not
dangerous." I told Yuri I would find out what
was going on. We hung up. I dialed 911, cross
examining myself. "Is this really an emergency?
Shouldn't I leave the line clear for really
urgent calls?" An operator answered. Before I
had a chance to ask her a question, she said,
"You should be evacuating." I shook my head
clear, "What?!" "You should be evacuating," she
repeated. I know that a lot of people piled
their stereo sets into their cars, and loaded the
contents of their filing cabinets in after them.
There were people who brought nothing out with
them. And people who brought their camping gear.
People who rolled up the Persian rugs and forgot
the baby pictures. Jewels and tuxedos and the
favourite formal gown got tossed into the car,
the skis strapped to the roof. People get crazy
during emergencies. But I teethed on
emergencies. My whole life had been an
emergency. With my father before me, my sister
aft, and my mother hiding her head in the corner,
I had no insular feeling that this couldn't
happen to me. I knew that anything could and
would happen to me. It was a matter of how to
celebrate that. As I looked around the house, I
did so in a fantasy world, act two, scene one, in
which our heroine's house burns down. Now, what
should she take with her on the run?
I started gathering a pile of items and
boxes that would go to the car, just a little car
on loan from the lab where David worked. His car
was in the shop. A little white sedan. What
could I fit in it? I dragged the box of
photographs into the hall. I fetched my cello,
my guitar, the picture of Yvonne that graced the
top of the piano. I opened the filing cabinet
and lifted all my writing out of it. Then went
back for copies of my art work. I took none off
the walls. I went to each step son's room to
rescue something that must be important to them.
Ben's guitar. I looked at his school books and
homework lying around on the floor. There was no
way I was going to rescue those things. He'd
hate me forever. Alex had gone off to U.C. Santa
Cruz a few weeks before. He had all his vital
objects. I thought of bringing his bass viol out
of his closet. But I imagined strapping it to
the top of the car. It would fall off while
backing out of the drive. It would shatter into
a million toothpicks and then the house would be
fine. We'd be minus a bass viol. I kissed it
goodbye.
I went down a list of what was necessary:
medications, the kids' blankies, a few cloth
diapers that Feyna used as security blankets,
videos of their birthday parties, and a handful
of videos to amuse them, a bag full of toys. I
was industrious and efficient. When I'd
collected a mountain of necessary, I started
hauling it all to the car. As I struggled out
the back door the first time, the sky was raining
down chunks of burning embers and debris. The
air was shimmering with heat, the undulations
that warp vision. Then as I carted off the last
of it, I brought the cat carrying case and called
to my cat, Vogelsang, who came quickly and
climbed right into the cage as if she knew what
was happening. With Vogelsang in the carrier, I
suddenly knew I was serious. The illusion of
this being an act evaporated.
I got a big piece of paper out and wrote
on it, "Do not enter. Go directly to Yvonne's
house. I will meet you there." I taped it to
the back door. I looked around, my eyes sweeping
the house for memories, for preciousness. I told
the house, "Goodbye," and went to the car. In a
hurry, I backed down the drive and into the
street, but stopped the car and went up to the
neighbors' houses, the ones who were old and hard
of hearing. I banged on their front doors. No
one answered. I rushed back to the car. Now I
was on my way out. I drove to the end of the
street and turned onto the main road. There was
an endless queue of cars, packed to the brim, all
waiting and honking in the bumper to bumper
traffic. I took my place in line, another line.
I knew how to wait in line.
Open your gates wide. Let all the
refugees enter into your waiting arms, dear God.
We are packed and ready. Show us the way.
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--
Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California USA
tobie at shpilchas.net
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