Who animates a story means contriving characters composed of persons an author has encountered or at least observed enough to imagine their possible roles. Blessed to know a wide range of people shuttling between East Falls Church, VA (somewhat quiet spot) and Naples, Italy (discordant, noisy spot), I’d crossed paths with varied fortunes, ethnicities and races before finishing high school. Averaging more than one annual move during the 1970s, I acquainted myself with folks in the intermountain West, the Midwest and Paris. France was where my new bride and I lived for an academic year before finally settling in Arizona. In my youth, I gravitated to persons with quirky tastes and offbeat personalities who invited in kindred spirits. Though they were not usually rascals, rascalites attracted me. Persons curious about their surroundings and eager to experiment and test, with or without consent of authorities, were on my radar.
Two particularly important Virginia high school chums became the physical and dispositional models for Matt and Chago. Both were quirky but one, taller and freckled, was calmer, more sanguine. The second, darker and shorter, more rambunctious than Matt, was a rapid yet convincing and charming speaker, and a lover of words and music. They both made me laugh ‘til I’d split. I believed each would run through a wall for me, also the reverse (drywall perhaps, but still.) If they recognize themselves in Fishbein, I hope they feel honored, as that was my intention. Three girls I met between my 17th and 23rd birthdays became amalgamated Louise Poole. None resembled the others or Louise, particularly. Each inspired my trying being an authentic boyfriend, though I lacked commitment to the task. My timing was wrong dating each of them, fatal to lasting relationships – reminiscent of Chago. Así es. One lady met her husband in college, and they ran a hardware store in the South. None is forgotten; all were admired, however inarticulately.
Other casting choices: Mrs. Colby was my Haycock Elementary third-grade teacher. At 8, I was a nuisance; she wrote a note to my parents after the initial grading period leading to a rare paternal “intervention” during my schooling. (I still have their notes back and forth.) My father perhaps had forgotten the impact my mother had on my literacy. She read to me daily until I began public school, and I’d already mastered the see-say reading method – as Colby discovered one day after school. Mrs. Colby had me read to her from the district’s readers to test a hypothesis. When I finished, breezing through a chapter from the 6th grade-level reader, she looked at me for a minute, then proposed a deal. If I didn’t pester other students in class, she said, she’d tell the librarian to let me check out chapter books. I could go to the school’s library on a pass once finished with my in-class reading or writing assignments. The genius of the deal was that Mrs. Colby offloaded the pest onto the librarian for a while, as I perused items more arresting than Dick’s and Jane’s narrative! Remember? “Look, Spot. Oh, look, look Spot. Look and see. Oh, see.” (I recall suspecting Father and Mother had dragged D&J, baby Sally and mastiff Spot in tow, through a federal witness protection relocation, assuring bland childhood upbringings, one warm oatmeal bereft of raisins or brown sugar.) Note the protagonists kept mouthing “oh,” an interjection bespeaking surprise. These three kids easily were startled! Mrs. Colby saved those dormant seeds of a “life of the mind” buried in furrows inside my skull, while I saved her sanity lurking in the library instead of distracting my classmates.
Other consequences of Mrs. Colby’s deal were first, that I became an avid reader in elementary grades, gravitating toward interesting books. Second, being surrounded by tomes consumable in childhood leisure informed my brief careers as a professional librarian during my mid-20s, and a Phoenix Public Library Board member decades later. Mr. Moses introduced me to Medieval Literature in English translation during college. He read passages from Chaucer aloud to the class, in Middle English. Chicagoan Moses wore tweed jackets with elbow patches and, failing frequently in properly tamping tobacco and lighting his pipe during classes, prompted students to wager when he’d ignite his sleeves with fugitive embers. (We’d hold our breaths during each pipe lighting attempt.) Quirky enough to model Erskine, he was far too reserved to portray him, becoming instead Moses, the high school English teacher and guide.
I wish I’d known folks resembling Drew Cromwell and Sylvaine Fishbein, but they’re composite characters. Of course I knew persons like Principal Tanner Hyde and his sidekick, Le Force, and so did you. Every high school is required to hire a least one such front office figure, I have it on good authority.
A man once told me the story of riding a mule as a boy from his rural home in Southwest Virginia a few miles to a country market. He shared that anecdote while together, we watched a giant leap for Mankind one July, 1969 night. There was no missing the awe in my father’s voice, comparing the duration and hazards of his adventure with the astronauts’ journey, explaining how stunning humankind’s progress in one lifetime felt to him. That self-disclosure would live in my novel even if it were my last effort.