Each Book in its Time

J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His books The Bankrupt Circus & Other Misadventures and The Book of Why were published through Silent Clamor Press.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature.

–Gaston Bachelard from The Poetics of Space

Sherry’s father looked like the writer Richard Brautigan–tall, thin, round glasses, blond, the mustache, even the high, slightly effeminate voice, which, at 13, I had only heard on the spoken word record album (recorded in Brautigan’s apartment in San Francisco).

So much was about listening. What Brautigan’s ‘84 suicide meant, in retrospect, was attributed to the reader, and foreshadowed in his ‘82 masterpiece So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away.

What really fascinated me, though, was how much Sherry, my neighbor and best friend, looked like Richard Brautigan, too. She really did– granny glasses, a straw hat, blonde hair, parted in the middle, which hung down to her shoulders—a flannel shirt, and a purposeful rip-in-the-knee of her jeans.

But . . . Sherry wasn’t fooling anyone: she had obviously taken a scissors and cut out a perfect square where the knee was supposed to be, and that square was the size of one of one of those old paperback books you find in used book stores (books with lurid covers—even if they are “literature”)—the price right on the cover. The better bookstores wrapped those old-timey books in plastic sheaths, sold them for five dollars, and didn’t expect anyone to open the plastic, let alone read them.

Sherry’s father had a whole collection of those books in a makeshift library he had put together in his den. I loved the colors of their collective covers—faded sunset red, dark evening coolness. Sherry and I called them “plastic books.” They were as useless as plastic (because nobody read them).

One evening after Sherry and I finished watching television in her living room, I became curious about the plastic books. Carefully I inched out a copy of Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel–the plastic taped just so with a rectangle on the back flap.

The book was beautiful–a Dell Contemporary Classic–95 cents, white italic letters–the author’s name and the title against a green background. What was most stunning about the cover was the black man whose back was turned fully on the would-be reader—the man’s face in profile, brown glasses, the color of his skin.

The man wore a brown hat–the same color as his suit. (We don’t have hats like that anymore, at least one doesn’t see them in fashion.) An expensive hat–a fedora–a ribbon of brown around its base, a side flap–I suppose for decoration. Facing the man on the left and right are two figures–a Middle Eastern man: bearded with dark eyes; he is blowing a plume of smoke (a lighter brown than the fedora) presumably from his nose because his mouth is closed. The Middle Eastern man’s eyes are surrounded by dark circles, but he does not wear glasses. A woman on the Middle Eastern man’s right is a curiosity: Brownish blonde hair–her right eye obscured by the black man’s fedora, her left eye looking directly at the reader–at me–a long nose not particularly slender and lightly shaded full pink lips. The left part of her face (right if looking directly at the cover) is shaded by shadow, and her hair, tousled, hangs down from the shadows and is transformed into a kind of golden ribbon. The back cover tells the story of a young rabbinical student and a marriage-broker and “the errant ways of the heart.”

Oh those errant ways I knew all too well. 

As I clandestinely slipped the book from its plastic sleeve and held the perfect square–a square that would have fit perfectly in the square in Sherry’s jeans, for a few moments I was truly happy. These moments occur so rarely that we try to keep them—to wrap them up, to protect them from prying eyes, from meddling hands. I imagined I was that rabbinical student and was to marry the beauty whose blonde hair was a golden ribbon. I would need a marriage broker because she and I were so young and in love and wanted to spend all eternity together. 

Then, it all came apart: I smelled the old glue from the long ago binding and worried, justifiably, that the flimsy paperback would fall apart in my hands. I would be caught by Sherry’s father, and asked to cut my own switch from the cherry tree that was dying in her front lawn. This was when I asked Sherry to marry me.

Sherry’s version of the story was that she watched with horror as I removed the book from her father’s library and then with more horror, she watched as I removed the plastic. She had not said a word–except “Yes” when the naked book was in my hand. I studied its cover for I don’t know how long and asked her to marry me.

In any other story, Sherry’s father would come home and complications would have arisen when Sherry was asked to choose sides. She could come clean and tell her father that she was getting married or pretend that I had never asked. None of that happened.

Like we were being watched from the den’s doorway, I slipped The Magic Barrel back into its plastic cover and placed it in its exact spot on the shelf, hoping to almighty God that her father wouldn’t find out. (I didn’t have much hope.) The strands of carpet could not be put back, nor the tape that held the plastic cover in place. Her father noticed everything; he looked like Richard Brautigan after all. I suspected he spent hours adjusting the spines of the plastic books–fiddling with each, matching them perfectly with the edge of the bookshelf. Sherry and I also knew that no matter how meticulously I tried to put The Magic Barrel back on the shelf, we would never be able to do so without her father’s notice. We knew that in just a matter of days or months or minutes, we would be found out. And then what?

Certainly no TV with Sherry in the living room. Maybe I would be banned from the house. I had read about dependency: how humans are the most co-dependent of all animals: clinging and cloying to each other. Forget Emerson’s evolutionary “self-reliance”–substitute instead “co-dependency” and, at 13, Sherry and I knew quite a lot about dependency: We were dependent on everyone for everything–although we didn’t like to admit it.

I had tried very hard to be a noticer like Sherry’s father, but I just couldn’t keep my mind calm or steady enough for long enough. I wondered how her father did it. Once I had come upon her father while he was sitting behind his green painted desk in his den-library. He was writing out a check, and I marveled at his precision–how slow-quick his hand scrawled–each number and letter, not so much perfect but symmetrical–as if he were carefully drawing them. And, after the check had been filled out, I could hear each perforation tear away. Then, he slowly wrote the amount in the ledger section of the check book, closed it carefully, and watched me as I showed in my eyes that I had deliberately watched him.

So, on the day of The Magic Barrel, Sherry and I decided to marry. We knew that this would take some doing. We would have to plan meticulously, and as we snapped out of the dream in which we found ourselves in her father’s den–with The Magic Barrel as securely in place as we could make it, our nuptial promises were made.

I’ll admit it was a crazy idea. I’ll admit had we thought about it, we would have realized that we could have continued on living in different houses–across the street-we didn’t even have to tell anybody–not really and outwardly nothing had to change, and still we would both know. But, there was a radical part of both of us that wanted, I think, to announce our engagement to the world by stealing away into the heart of America. How could we change our predicament without showing change at all?

  I’d read all of Richard Brautigan’s novels from The Confederate General at Big Sur through The Abortion, from The Hawkline Monster to Dreaming of Babylon from Willard and His Bowling Trophies to Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel to So The Wind Won’t Blow it All Away. There are the compellingly odd stories in Tokyo Montana Express (segmented in chapters) and Revenge of the Lawn. There are the quirky poems in The Octopus Frontier, Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt, and Please Plant This Book; there’s the surrealism of In Watermelon Sugar, and, of course, Trout Fishing in America, which so captured the angst of the 60s.

Sadly, after the success of Trout Fishing–the critics and the public abandoned Richard. What was most hurtful were the comments disparaging his work. On the record, the one recorded in his San Francisco apartment, his voice is just as I imagine it should be. I still read Dreaming of Babylon–Brautigan’s detective novel—with his nasal voice in my head. In my own dreams, I often hear him narrating in the same muffled way I hear him on the record–joking, having fun–serious, but not taking himself too seriously. He said he never understood why people found him funny or perhaps he couldn’t understand why people were laughing. “There is a moose in the backyard,” he would say and people would laugh.

The concept was Brautiganesque–to build a house within a house.

By 1983, our basement had never been finished. My mother thrust the whole of herself into putting together–for that’s what my mother would have called it–the entirety of the upstairs. Each item had its place: What we called the Living Room was dead space: a non-descript couch, a green carpet, an old stereo (no one played) and a pine-green chair that no one sat in.

However, when it came to the basement, my mother was a master procrastinator. Thus, our basement remained unfinished. Packing boxes (there were five of them at the time as tall as I) were stacked against the side wall and left unopened–reminants from our Philadelphia apartment.

I don’t know why my mother never unpacked the boxes–perhaps they signified unpleasant memories, but, for whatever reason, the moving boxes remained stacked high against the side wall of the basement.

Thus, I got the idea to live in our unfinished basement with Sherry, but not just in the basement but in one of the boxes.

But. . .the best of all laid plans–right? 

It all unraveled around Sherry and me when Sherry told her younger sister Kendra that we were getting married and running away. As absurd and as innocent as this sounds now, as well-read and educated as Sherry’s father was, as progressive as I thought him to be–he was simply not as enlightened as I thought, and, well, basically hit the proverbial roof and forbade Sherry to see me. He veritably locked her in her room and called my parents. My mother’s voice rang out in a semi-continuing high pitch. My father arched his eyebrows and placed his hands on his hips. I could forget about television seemingly forever and going to Sherry’s house? Well, forget about that forever, too.

Suddenly, love found me not with Eros’ arrow but maddenly adrift. I had lost my companion and my best friend and what’s more I began to hate the real Richard Brautigan. In my adolescent mind–they had become one.

Thus, I decided, and it didn’t take very long to run away by myself. By running away, perhaps to call attention to myself, what I reckoned was my mistreatment–all over over a blabber-mouth sister?

My mind began racing, but I made what I considered an ingenious plan. I cut a hole in the back of one of the moving boxes, left a cardboard flap. From another box, I created a square that served as a cardboard roof. Then I filled in the top of the box with curtains and cast-off clothing: old dresses–flowers and prints that were no longer any semblance of contemporary style (dresses, skirts, blouses, belts) as far as my mother was concerned that were no longer with us.

I found a short stemmed pole and propped up the cardboard roof, added layers of clothing on top and fashioned for myself a kind of foxes’ den, which I supplied with snacks, a water jug, Brautigan's books, and two flashlights. I found a pair of pants that my father must have worn and a big-buckle belt that held them up. I wore a shirt of my mother’s–a green and beige flower print.

I looked in all of the boxes for a hat and found a crazy top hat my own father had worn to his wedding. What was a young man without a sufficient hat? Brautigan was, at least in my imagination, always wearing a floppy one with a brim. Without any fanfare, one afternoon after school, I crawled into the box–closed the flap, switched on the flashlights and began to read, clutching Dreaming of Babylon in one hand and my wounded broken heart in the other. Although I tried my darnedest to hate him–I couldn’t hate his writing.

The irony was not lost on me that I had supposedly run away without leaving home. I would crawl out of the box when everyone was asleep and forage for food, change clothes, shower when no one was home and live in splendid isolation.

So as not to sound maudlin, this was a serious endeavor, and the box house was warm and cozy like a womb–well-lit by the two flashlights. All around me were the remnants of curtains–their folds creased and darkened by dust.

I sat in the miniature house box, its roof held up with the metal rod. Above me, beyond the cardboard, lay a pile of my mother’s clothes–below me–who knew what. And, I realized from this new perspective that I could hear the disembodied voices from the living room above.

In 1984, Richard Brautigan cocked the gun and pointed at the Godhead. Did he indeed really know what he was doing? Was he tired of trodding the same well-worn paths: making his way down bakery aisles and pretending to peruse but instead picking out the same delights each time? And then his soul was torn free to rummage and roam like an epic poem. In that late summer ‘84 around the same time he shot himself–his body was decomposing for days–maybe weeks before he was found.

I kept myself captive for three days–where I listened to sometimes truthful, sometimes half-truthful conversations about me: I heard the voices of neighbors, of police, of teachers, who I knew didn’t really miss me ‘though they said they did. Above me all wondered with each passing day’s greater alarm where I had gone. Yet, the sounds of these voices, even when talking about me, were not as strange as the sounds of the night–persistant hums and guttural high-pitched comings and goings, happenings beyond, the clicks of the hazy arriving day–accompanied me through Richard Brautigan’s books. I attempted to etch–nearly swallow–each word lest I forget it.

And in due course, the flashlights’ bulbs became dimmer as I made my way through The Confederate General at Big Sur. I could relate to the isolated roads and rocky crags that edged out over the beach. In The Abortion, there was a secret library for all books–where one could bring his or her book and place it on the shelf, hoping maybe someone would check it out–maybe someone wouldn’t–it didn’t seem to matter–only that the book had been written. Then, Trout Fishing In America–the fish almost a cuneiform dedication and the two boys–one who lied and one who tried. Even now, the great urge is to go back and get the facts right. That amazing first line In Watermelon Sugar that blends poetry and prose–“In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” And, the magical short story collection Revenge of the Lawn–a title I still can not forget.

In the long soul-searching days over 40 years later, I must pause–take stock.

My family tried mostly everything they could think of to find me–hanging posters of my smiling face plastered to telephone poles, canvassing the neighborhood, even talking to reporters. My name was mentioned between insipid songs on A.M. Radio. Seemingly, I could hear everything.

I thought for a moment they might find me when they searched the house–my bedroom with its stereo and records, my posters and books–later I found that investigators even took up my green, white and yellow striped rug, looked under the beds and in all the closets, rifled through the dresser drawers, and read every note and studied every picture on my bulletin board. They tramped around outside, rummaged through the wooden fort Dad and I had made, asked other classmates and all of the neighbors. They searched through the basement. I find it hard to believe that they never looked in the miniature house where I hid still and quiet. But the facsimile of a house (in miniature) gives us power. Indeed the world is a strange, serendipitous place.

I continued reading The Hawkline Monster–the mystery of the monster in the basement living in ice caves. Brautigan’s language–its unadorned simplicity in plain sight like light that flies around the house.

I waited to be uncovered–for someone to open the box, to lift up the clothes above my head, to literally reach down and find me.

And then the world of the basement was quiet.

  Later that night, I crept out of my hiding place, through the open garage filled with rake shadows and out onto the driveway. Fall was beginning to feel its way into our bones, and the moonlight shone down through the yellow leaves that hung from the large maple tree out back.

It was quite late, still the crickets were chirping like a metronome, and although I was alone, my feeling for all of it was as big as the world: the sky, the ground, the grass, the leaves. The stars, like the fireflies, were sometimes steady, sometimes blinking in the distance. And I was cold and hungry and tired, but the music in my heart was suddenly filled with the reason I was doing this. And, that’s when Sherry’s light flicked on across the street, and her silhouette turned into a shadow and then into her full self. She was waving.

Sherry came to me later that night and knocked on the box. She told me she had crept over the lawn and through the open garage door; she knocked softly on the side of the box, and I opened the flap.

I had been in the middle of reading Richard’s confessional novel So The Wind Won’t Blow it All Away–a tragic story, whose word drunk obsessions lead in part to action, then to paralysis and then to moving away. Like Brautigan, I found solace in suffering and realized I had transformed Sherry into a literary character. The basement was so quiet that I thought it might take on a laughter of its own.  

The shadows settled around us both. Sherry squeezed into our miniature house, took up So The Wind Won’t Blow it All Away and began reading aloud. The two characters, who, at the end of the book, are fishing in their temporary living room, smile at us. As I laid my head on Sherry’s lap and looked at the square in the knee of her jeans, I realized that sometimes the world opens up and the really unexpected happens.

I expected my parents to be mad at me forever. I half-expected the police to arrest me because I had sent them on such a wild goose chase. I certainly expected that box to be there forever–even after we sold the house–that little room I had made–still propped up with the pole.

Although I bought the book, I never did read Brautigan’s The Unfortunate Woman–published posthumously. I thought about it but couldn’t open it and face myself–let alone read it. 

“One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.” Gaston Bachelard from The Poetics of Space