While my forthcoming book Memoirs of a Starving Artist currently being proofed, I'm about three weeks away from release. Once the book comes out I plan to give away a few paperback copies, but in the meantime I've decided to give away one pre-release e-book copy per week for the next three weeks. Winners will be chosen in random drawings from people who are signed up on my "New Release and Giveaway" mailing list. This mailing list is only for new release and giveaway notifications. No spam, no unwanted newsletters, no sharing e-mail addresses with anyone else anywhere. So if you do want to be entered into the weekly drawings, you can sign up below. If you are already signed up for the mailing list, you're already entered in the drawings. I'll announce the winners here each week starting next Monday. Good luck!
As for this week's installment of Memoir Monday, today we take another look at life in our nation's capital for an idealistic young scribe:
As for this week's installment of Memoir Monday, today we take another look at life in our nation's capital for an idealistic young scribe:
Chapter Six – The South Will Rise Again
I sat on a stone
bench near the capitol building in Washington, DC, feeling frustrated.
After two years of effort I had my master’s degree and I was back in the
nation’s capital. Surely this time an interesting job would be there for
the taking, right? A graduate degree was bound to move my resume to the
top of the pile. Unfortunately I quickly realized that in Washington, a
master’s degree from San Diego State University was hardly worth the paper it
was printed on. I had a good understanding of international
politics. I could write well. I was smart… Yet if the degree
did not have an East Coast stamp, it didn’t seem to do me any good at all when
it came to finding a job.
I’d already
applied to nearly every government agency I could think of and failed across
the board. Nobody wanted to hire me, or even talk to me at all. I
still couldn’t even get an interview. I gazed up at the stone and marble
dome of the capitol hovering above me, so imposing as it reached for the
sky. I felt as though it were mocking me. I’d played by the
rules. I’d studied hard. Here I was, offering myself as a servant
to this government that wanted nothing to do with me.
At that moment I
felt like I just wanted to blow that dome sky high. Maybe not literally,
but figuratively at the very least. I started to think about the illusion
of permanence in our system of government. I was small and
inconsequential but this government of ours was a solid, enduring edifice, just
like that dome. It was larger than life and would last forever.
That’s what a solid government building like this was supposed to symbolize,
anyway, just like all of the imposing memorials all around the mall. I
realized, though, that there really was no permanence to any of it. Every
government fails eventually. The ancient Roman Empire was full of solid,
imposing stone buildings. Many of those buildings endure to this day, but
the empire is long gone. Someday our system of government would be gone
as well. When might it happen? And how? It wasn’t something
most people ever considered. Just like they probably didn’t think much
about it in Rome, either. Or the Soviet Union. But what if I wrote
a novel chronicling the disintegration of the United States, and made it
actually believable? Maybe that would get people thinking.
It is these
moments of inspiration that can lead me to spend years plugging away at a
fiction project. I realized that some people would think that just
writing this novel was a traitorous act. It was a little bit like burning
the American flag. Not that I had any desire to do that, but to me the
freedom to burn the flag was what this country was all about. It proved
that we were solid enough in our convictions to not feel threatened by a mere
symbolic act of dissent. This was equally true of the freedom to write
whatever I wanted. I decided to title the book Flag Burning.
It would be my own symbolic act of dissent.
In a strange twist
of irony, I ended up spending long hours working away at this new novel in the
Library of Congress, which I lived near once again. As I started writing
I felt a kinship with some of my old literary heroes. Perhaps I was a bit
of a rebel after all. My story followed a U.S. Army general who uses the
ensuing chaos of two concurrent wars as an excuse to take over the
government. I felt like I was finally writing the type of story I’d been
meant to write all along. It had a fast-paced plot but was also
subversive and it had the substance of thought behind it.
For research I
rode my bike to Arlington National Cemetery and spent several days wandering
the grounds. My General Harrison was from the South and would have felt a
connection to Robert E. Lee, whose former property the cemetery
encompassed. I lingered in Lee’s house, where he made his fateful
decision to resign his union commission and support the confederacy. It
was here in the same spot, looking over the Potomac at all of Washington spread
before him that Harrison would lead his final assault on the capital. To
Harrison, “The South Will Rise Again,” was more than a cheap slogan on some
souvenir confederate flag. It would become a vendetta against all of the
perceived sleights on his family, his Southern culture, and the civilian
political establishment’s abuse and misuse of the armed forces.
At the very back
of the cemetery I found a small confederate section. Surely Harrison would
have relatives buried in this plot. The area consisted of concentric
circles of graves surrounding a Confederate war memorial in the center.
There were perhaps fewer than a thousand souls buried here, and while the
markers in the rest of the cemetery were rounded on top, here they came to a
sharp point. It was said that this was so Union soldiers would not commit
the indignity of sitting on top of them.
The monument in
the center consisted of the figure of a woman in robes standing atop a 30-foot
tall column. She leaned against a plow and held a wreath in one
hand. At the base was a relief of Confederate soldiers in battle, holding
each other up as they marched across a field. One side bore the following
inscription:
“Not for Fame or Reward
Not for Place or for Rank
Not Lured By Ambition
Or Goaded By Necessity
But in Simple
Obedience to Duty
As They Understood It
These Men Suffered All
Sacrificed
All
Dared All – And Died”
- Randolph
Harrison McKim
I worked away at
this novel and finished a rough draft, but it was nothing I was ready to send
out to anyone. In the meantime I found work as temp. Despite the
master’s degree, here I was, back to the daily drudgery that I knew would sap
my soul bit by bit, day after day, until before long there would be nothing
left. I kept applying for better jobs, but no matter how many resumes I
sent out, the results were the same. Nothing.
Even though I
struggled professionally, there were still things that inspired me about
DC. I loved living in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood as before.
I spent evenings in the neighborhood pubs, where my new roommates knew everyone
who came through the door, and soon so did I. This was a lifestyle I’d
never experienced on the West Coast, but it appealed to me. The bartender
began pouring our brews of choice before our butts even hit the barstools and
the conversation flowed faster than the beer. Now I realized where the
idea for the television show Cheers came from. This was one big
family, as tight-knit as any I’d seen. When the weather warmed in the
springtime, we spent afternoons in one backyard or another grilling out or
mixing up big pots of gumbo. Weekends occasionally found us playing
softball on a diamond near our house.
I also loved
living in a city with such history. According to the owner of our house,
John Wilkes Booth had stopped there after shooting Lincoln to change his horse
at a stable that once stood in the backyard. Sitting in the Hawk and
Dove pub I could look out the window and picture the British forces camped
out on Pennsylvania Avenue, laying siege to the Capitol during the War of
1812. Most of the brick row houses lining the street were built during
that century and many had no doubt hardly changed since.
When the temp job
I had at an engineering company eventually turned permanent, I settled in and
made the best of it. This wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my life,
but at least it paid the bills. I polished my Flag Burning novel
at night. I sent my movie scripts to agents and kept entering
contests. I was nowhere near to giving up on this dream.
In the meantime I
began playing for another amateur soccer team, this time in Virginia. I
still dreamt distantly of playing as a professional. A new league had
just formed in the U.S., called Major League Soccer. A guy from a pickup
group I played with was signed by D.C. United, the best team in the country at
that time. A group of us went to RFK Stadium to watch his first game,
where he held his own during 20 minutes of playing time. He was being
paid $30,000 per season, which was a pittance for a player on a major
professional sports team, but even so I would gladly have traded places with
him. I would have played for free, but how would I even go about
it? Spend the next several seasons trying to work my way up from amateur
to a minor league and then hoping to get a shot at a tryout? I was
already 30 years old; far too old to be signed as a rookie. Besides, I’d
always aspired to make my living in the intellectual world, not the
physical. Chasing after this secondary dream would have meant taking time
and energy away from my writing.
The regrets were
hard to banish completely. I still lived
the fantasy every weekend, tempering my disappointments by playing as well as I
could. One Saturday, I was at my usual position as a forward when a
teammate lofted a cross into the penalty box. I launched into the air and
was flying toward the ball when my skull was violently knocked sideways by the
head of a leaping defender. I landed on my feet and wobbled toward the
sidelines. My legs felt like rubber and the whole world seemed to spin
around me. My eyes closed and my consciousness faded to black. When
I opened my eyes again I was lying on my back on the grass looking up at the
heads of my coach and teammates as they gathered around me in a circle
above. “You passed out,” the coach informed me. “Are you all
right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,”
I replied, afraid that if I admitted otherwise he might not let me back into
the game.
“I think you better
sit out for a while and take it easy,” said the coach.
“Yeah, all right,”
I agreed. My mind was in a fog. Some teammates helped me up and led
me to the bench. As the game continued I looked around at the field, and
the leafy deciduous trees surrounding it. Where was I? After some
time I realized that I was in Virginia. I was playing in a soccer game in
Virginia. That was the only thing that I remembered. The rest was a
complete blank; near total amnesia. Did I live in Virginia? I
didn’t think so. But where did I live? I had no idea. I came
from somewhere else far away, I was fairly certain, though I had no idea where
that was. I started to worry, wondering if I had any health
insurance. Maybe if I had a job, I had health insurance. Did I have
a job? Again, I had no idea.
I sat on the
sidelines for the rest of the game, trying to piece everything together.
After thirty minutes I remembered that I lived in Washington, DC. I
remembered that I had a truck, and that I’d driven to the game. I could
drive myself home, if only I could recall where my apartment was. My
teammates knew that I was in bad shape. They offered to call an
ambulance. They told me that I had a serious concussion. They said
that it was dangerous to go to sleep and that I should see a doctor. By
the end of the game I remembered that I had no health insurance. I
managed to drive myself home and then went to sleep.
A week later I was
back on the field, still dreaming of what might have been. Instead of a
professional career, the legacy of that concussion is what stayed with me over
the years. My memory began to seem a bit muddled. In recent years
especially my short-term memory has begun to fade and I’ve had a harder time
focusing. I struggle at times to remember what I did in the days or weeks
before. Perhaps even worse for a writer, I often have a difficult time
coming up with the best word to fit into a sentence. Words that would
have sprung to mind easily in years past now escape me. Le mot juste,
as the French say, is hard to come by. A thesaurus helps, but the trend
is worrisome. Are these really symptoms of that concussion? Some
years earlier, playing goalie on a team in California, I’d also had a
concussion when an opposing player missed the ball and kicked me with full
force, square in the head. Whether these incidents are to blame for any
impaired cognitive function is unclear, but the prospect that they might be
makes me decidedly uneasy. If I am going to finally make it as a writer,
I feel that I’d better hurry up about it before my abilities degenerate any
further.
Some weeks after
my Virginia concussion, I got what seemed to be the biggest break in my
fledgling writing career to date. A family connection became an agent at
one of the biggest, most powerful agencies in Hollywood, the William Morris
Agency. She agreed to look at my Mandate of Heaven script.
If she liked it, I might finally be on my way. For the next few months I
was in regular contact with Lesley’s personal assistant, Myles. He seemed
like a nice guy, always eager to talk to me if I called on the phone and
responding quickly to my e-mails. When I planned a trip back to
California to see my parents, Myles suggested that I come in for a meeting to
discuss the script. I wasn’t sure what there was to talk about yet
exactly, but getting a literal foot in the door at a major agency seemed like a
good idea. On the day of the big meeting I tried not to get my hopes too
high. Still, I put on my best approximation of a Hollywood writer’s
outfit, with khaki pants and a button down shirt. I drove into Beverly
Hills and dropped my beat up old pickup truck with a valet. I made my way
into the office and then sat in the waiting room along with a famous Olympic
gymnast and a few mid-level actors that I recognized.
When it was my
turn to meet with Lesley, I was escorted up the elevator and down a hallway by
another assistant. Myles was home sick that day, I found out. His
replacement showed me into Lesley’s office where I sat in a chair and waited
for a few minutes until she came in to greet me, her arms clutching a stack of
manila folders that she placed on the desk. I stood and reached out to
shake her hand.
“It’s nice to see
you,” Lesley said. The two of us went to the same high school, but
because she was three years older than me I’d hardly known her there.
What I did know was that she’d been Homecoming Queen, and one of the most
popular girls in the school. More than ten years on, her beauty and
charisma were intact. In fact, all of the people working for this agency
seemed to be extremely good looking. They were the beautiful people, from
the bottom on up. This was Hollywood after all, where image was
everything. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Lesley added.
“Yeah, it has been
a while,” I agreed. We launched into the customary chit-chat about our
home town and common connections, but I could tell that these pleasantries were
causing a bit of a strain. Lesley was a busy woman.
“About your
script,” she finally cut to the chase, looking somewhat embarrassed. “I
have to admit that I haven’t read it yet. I don’t really handle writers
anyway, I work with actors, but I might be able to pass it along to somebody.”
“Ok,” I
replied. “That would be great.”
“To be honest, I’m
wondering why you arranged to come in for this meeting in the first place,” she
went on.
I was too
embarrassed to tell her that the meeting wasn’t my idea at all. It was
Myles’ idea. He was the one who suggested it. He was the one who
scheduled it. Was there some ulterior motive on his part? “I just
thought, since I was going to be in town anyway, it would be nice to come in
and say hello.”
“Oh. Well
it’s too bad that Myles was sick today. He was looking forward to meeting
you.”
So there it
was. I’d suspected it all along. Myles only scheduled this meeting
as a pretext to meet me. The joke was really on Lesley and me both,
sitting here across from each other due to the misguided romantic whims of her
absent assistant. Lesley didn’t have the time or inclination to give me
anything more than a quick courtesy visit, and even that was pushing it.
“I’m sorry about
the script. I’ll try to take a look at it when I can,” Lesley said.
And that was that. I flew back to Washington a few days
later. Eventually she passed the script on to another agent, who showed
no interest. My best connection to the business so far was a total bust.
In DC I managed to
stick it out at the engineering company for a year until finally I couldn’t
take it anymore. I was struggling with $18,000 in student loans to pay
off, but when my grandmother decided to give $5,000 to each of my sisters and
me, that was all I needed to throw in the towel on what was seeming like a
failed experiment. There was still the Foreign Service as an
option. I signed up for the written exam and marked Canberra, Australia,
as my closest test location. Then I put my truck in storage with all of
my belongings locked in the back. As the falling leaves of autumn
signaled the coming of winter, I hopped on a plane and headed south to summer
down under. To hell with my life’s plan. I’d work that out later.
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