I posted an older story, a harris & company, because I wanted to write about how I work as a writer and this one was important because it was one of the ones that lead to the discovery of my voice.
First, I was in graduate school, an MFA Program at Bowling Green University in Ohio (which, by the way, is one state I prefer to fly over rather than drive through, but the program was helpful in that it gave me plenty of time to write since the teaching assistantship was not demanding, there were few other distractions apart from playing pinball with my esteemed colleagues like Jimmy Powell, Gordon Anderson (both of whom would later be my partners in the first year of the bookstore Intellectuals & Liars in LA), Joel Dailey, Randy Signor (both of whom would end up working at the store, though Randy’s contribution excelled all the others), and others too numerous to name. There was always breakfast afterwards at 2:30-3:00 in the morning when the bars closed and the pinball machines lay dormant. But I’m off topic here, as usual.
So, I was visiting my friend Rip Crystal (older brother to Billy) in LA where he was sharing an apartment with Joel Gotler who was, if I remember correctly, still an agent at William Morris before he struck out on his own (that’s Joel, not Rip, who was writing/acting there). Anyway, Joel decided I needed help coming up with stories so he gave me one: the trip his friend A. (Arnie) Harris took to Mexico to buy drugs, I think, though I might be wrong here (you see what an impression that original story had on me). Anyway I was polite and listened but what struck me most about the whole experience that visit was the fact that Joel was involved with some woman who would call him up at all hours of the day and night and say “Come” and he would drop everything and go. This image of him rushing off stayed with me long after the trip was over.
Now the trip was just before I started the MFA Program so things were fermenting in my head.
Oh yeah, there’s another little piece of the story I should add: Al Secunda. He was a former agent at William Morris, too (I knew these people through Rip who had worked there, also, as an agent before he decided to let his artistic side flow and quit). Well Al decided to be an actor and left the agency to pursue that career. But the thing about Al was that he had all these part-time jobs to support himself while trying to make it as an actor, including handing out take-ones for WTFM and working at Gimbels around the same time I worked there but in different departments (I was in vacuums and he was, I think, in Mens’ Wear). He’s the one who watered the fake plants and caused a flood on the 2nd floor of the store.
Anyway, there I was at BG sitting in my office in the basement of Hanna Hall ignoring my office mate who was reciting Gregory Corso’s poem on marriage when the germ of the story started to work its way from my head to paper on my typewriter (this was ages before PCs). What came out was the story posted.
So even though a harris started out as Joel’s friend’s story, only the name remained, along, of course, with bits and pieces of Joel and Al. Characters we create in turn create themselves. We give them a back story, facts and personality traits, throw them into a situation where they must interact with other characters we have also created in much the same way, and they take on a life of their own.
And that’s the joy of it: allowing for discoveries. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s more or less the way life works, too, right?