Fiction Attic

June 10, 2006 What a handsome wee chap! Oscar looks exactly like you–is Kevin pissed? (Janet’s kind of ticked off that neither of the kids look much like her. Thomas started off looking like me but has gone on to find his own face, and Rona favors me more than Janet too.)

No doubt about it, raising kids is awful. It’s embarrassing to have people over (people who don’t have kids anyway, or who don’t know my kids), because Thomas never, ever shuts up and crawls all over anybody. The more you scold him the more amped up he gets. He crawled into bed with us about 5:15 this morning and peed. But last night he read almost verbatim a whole Thomas the Tank Engine book to us. It wasn’t a See-Dick-Run type, either–it was a real story, about thirty pages long with lots of dialogue and lots of characters. He didn’t really read it, of course, but he had memorized it from us reading it to him just this week (it’s a library book so he did it within the last few days.) He has an amazing memory. If I try to do any condensing while reading a story I’ve read to him before (like the 100 page Disney version of 101 Dalmations), he corrects me. I can’t even leave out a “he said.” I wish there was some kind of contest I could enter him in, or something he could make money at in Vegas. But I don’t think I could stay at home with him all day the way Janet does. No wonder she’s always in a bad mood. I think when he really learns to read he’ll calm down a lot, but it will also ruin his life. Better him than us.

You haven’t heard Richard Thompson? I’d think Kevin would be a big fan. He’s been around since the sixties and is one of the most amazing guitarists and songwriters ever. I’m a fanatic. He’s an English guy who started out as a kid with some Celtic folk group called Fairport Convention and then split off and recorded with his wife Linda Thompson through the seventies and early eighties. Their album “Shoot Out the Lights” is on most every top-whatever great albums of all time lists. He’s certainly on my top five list of all time saddest songs with “Beeswing.” See if you can download or upload or i-pod or whatever you do with songs and the internet. It’s about a wild woman the singer falls in love with (”She was a fine thing/Fine as a beeswing/So fine a breath of air might blow her away/She was a lost child/She was runnin’ wild/She said as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.) It will break your heart, especially the end:

 Last I heard she was sleepin' rough
 Down on the Darby beat
 White Horse in her hip pocket
 A wolf hound at her feet
 And they say her flower has faded
 Hard living and hard booze
 But I guess that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse
 And they say she even married once
 A man named Romney Brown
 But even a gypsy caravan was too much settlin' down

Also listen to a song he does with his son called “Persuasion.” It’s the most beautiful melody I’ve ever heard. I could go on for pages about Richard Tompson. His most famous song, which you probably have heard, is called “Vincent Black Lightning.” It’s a love song about a woman and a bank robber and his motorcycle–very cool and very spooky. The guitar is unbelievable–it’s only Richard Thompson but it sounds like three guitars. Best place to start with him is an a sort of best-of album called “Action-Packed.” If I could figure out how to burn a CD I’d make a copy for you– maybe I’ll try. He also does a bad-ass acoustic version of “Oops, I Did it Again,” but that’s on a different album.

For my birthday we went to the bookstore. I got Edward P. Jones’s short stories, “Lost in the City,” because everything else I’ve read by him has blown me away. I also bought Ethan Canin’s “Carry Me Across the Water” because it was marked down to $2.49 in hardback. I got James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” one of those books writers are always talking about but that I’d never read. I started reading it last night and am about halfway through it–it’s only about 190 pages. You’d love it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s very sexy. Janet got me a couple of books for my birthday through Amazon: “Ain’t Got No Cigarettes,” which is a collection of a bunch of conversations with various Nashville people about Roger Miller (”King of the Road” guy), who must have been the funniest person who ever lived. (I’m going to start using one of his lines. Whenever the telephone would ring he’d say, “Get that. It might be the phone.” I don’t know why but that just cracks me up. When people would avoid picking up the check at a restaurant he’d say they had “shellout falter.”) She also got me “The Tao of Willie,” which is a pretty embarrassing book, and I’m the world’s biggest Willie Nelson fan.

Love, Wade

June 6, 2006 Fussy, I still want to get up there to see you and the boys but blah, blah, blah. The summer keeps filling up with weddings and trips to Scotland and baby showers and crap like that. Maybe in September? I am an idiot in that I cussed out my credit card company a few years ago when I found out everybody else gets air miles and I’d had the same credit card since 1989 and they’d never given me squat. So they started giving me airmiles for $75 a year, and they’re on American Airlines, which means of course that they’re useless if you have two kids, since every flight has to go through Dallas. Things that are so easy and natural for other people are the things I suck worst at. Janet’s no good at those things either, but she’s got an excuse since she’s foreign. Anyway, I got something like 100,000 air miles that I need to find a way to burn.

Below are some pictures of my kids. My little girl is so mean. Thomas was always a conniver, deal-maker, negotiator, wheedler–he manipulates you in a way to try to make you believe you’re winning when really he’s getting everything on his list. Rona simply amps up from zero to sixty when she doesn’t get her way. She goes from a grumble to a screech. She doesn’t cry, usually–she just screeches when she’s pissed off, and she gets pissed off a lot. Thomas and I call her Little Grumbly Granny or the Screech Owl. He’s very sweet to her, and she adores him–they gang up on me and Janet all the time Check out the last two pictures–he’s showing her how to write letters. Very sweet. Wish he’d show me.

I keep up with you through your blog. I wish we had a Mongolian baby-sitter. We’re getting a sitter tonight, one of maybe eight or nine times we’ve had a sitter in the past four years. It’s my birthday (happy birthday to me, etc.), so we’re going to go do something, probably to the mall, where Janet will clothes shop and I’ll screw around in the book store or record store until she’s finished. It’s amazing how un-eclectic my tastes are, and they’re getting narrower all the time. I used to listen to both kinds of music, country and western (favorite Blues Brothers reference of my undergraduate years). Now I don’t listen to anything but Richard Thompson. I’m a Richard Thompson fanatic. Luckily he puts out a record every eleven or twelve minutes so I have plenty of new stuff to listen to. He sells stuff only through his website now, and stuff goes out of print after a week or two, so you have to act fast. I’ll go to the record store anyway and look at their Richard Thompson CD’s, if they have any. If they don’t I’ll go to the book store and see if they have a copy of The Moviegoer, because that’s the only book I read now (not counting your books, of course.)

That’s not entirely true. I found a tape Kevin made for me ten years ago–Graham Parker on one side and Steve Forbert on the other. It still works! I used to listen to the Graham Parker all the time but assumed I’d lost the tape, and I was very excited when I found it, and now Thomas’s favorite song is “Short Memories,” which is also my favorite song on that tape. We especially like the way he says “shovelin’ coal” in the verse that goes “My daddy fought in Mycacea/Egypt and North Korea/He came home to a good career/Shovelin’ coal!” Thomas makes me sing that part over and over again and cracks up every time.

Write me back!

Love, Wade

Fussy, a few things:

1. I want acknowledgment that I was the one who named you Fussy (full name, “Little Miss Fussybritches”) way back when in Arkansas. It’s turning out to be my only claim to fame.

2. Why beat up on poor old Garrison Keillor? I got a soft spot for the guy. Prairie Home Companion is generally a snooze but it sounds good in our sixties house on a Saturday afternoon when the light through the door into the backyard is just right and if you turn the radio down just low enough that you can’t hear it and you drink yourself into a whiskey stupor, and his Writer’s Almanac takes a beating (some poet really railed on him in Poetry magazine recently) but it’s interesting to know when writer’s birthdays are (I guess), and I haven’t read any of his books, but every now and then he publishes a little essay in The Nation exhalting democracy that will bring tears to your eyes. Yes, his lawsuit against that guy for dissing Prairie Home Companion is kind of lame, but sometimes you just gotta let the old guys stand outside and yell at the kids to get out of their yards.

3. David Koen was going to come stay in our house (which we haven’t sold yet) until all that New Orleans crap gets sorted out, but he can’t get Kittie to move to Houston.

4. Whatever happened to the Suite? I bet Kevin published it for a million dollars and didn’t give us our cut.

5. I’ll be your literary executor if you’ll be mine. I think I’d be an awesome literary executor. You would be too. We’d both be good ones.

6. Remember that song “It’s just you and me and we just disagree?” For awhile there was a guy who worked here named Dwayne Mason, which is what I thought the name of the singer of that song was, and I was always making little jokes when I ran into him in the elevator about how he just had that one hit back in the seventies and now look what happened to him. That sort of thing. Anyway, I found out the singer’s name was Dave Mason, not Dwayne, so no wonder that guy never had any idea what I was talking about.

7. Our weird little neighborhood has its own monthly newsletter called the Shepherd Park Plaza Pulse. It reminds you when heavy trash pickup is and includes a few daffynitions, points to ponder, that sort of thing. It also lists the residents who have birthdays that month. Janet was excited when we got our first issue and saw the birthday listings. “Wow, it’s a really young neighborhood. Nobody here is over 31 years old!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those numbers were the birthdates of the people, not their ages.

8. I’ll send you some pictures of our old house. Maybe somebody in San Francisco wants to buy it just for the novelty of owning a house in Houston. That’s why we bought it and we’ve never regretted it.

Love, Wade

June 30, 2005 Fussy, I have been thinking about you and the boys very much but have been too embarrassed to call or write because the presents we bought to send never got sent despite my wife’s constant not so gentle reminders that we needed to send them and my constant going out the door without picking up the presents to send–by the way, that is a habit of mine; I have in my office a nice little football with one of those propeller tail things that you can throw a long way which I bought four years ago as a Christmas present for my godson in Louisiana. It’s all wrapped up and addressed to him but mailing packages freaks me out because you have to go stand in line and watch things get weighed. That’s also why I never sent out stories while I was in grad school (that and the fact that they sucked). Life’s been a mess, way out of control, and my response is simply to drink more whiskey.

Second babies are very easy but first babies get a lot harder when the second baby comes. That’s our experience anyway. Rona’s a cool customer, very laid back. My little boy is way out of control and our house is way small. It’s to the point that easily 85% of the time whatever he is doing is something he needs to be whipped about. If you figure out what to do about Oscar waking up and screaming every night please let me know–I’ve had that problem since my early twenties.

We are actually under contract to buy a house we like very much but we’re afraid the appraisal won’t support the price. We may just buy it anyway–the old woman who is selling it is very manipulative and has a religious evil streak but we’re all quite cordial. It has a swimming pool, which we didn’t want and which now we do want. It’s a 60’s ranch-style, the kind with the dim, cool, carpeted den that’s perfect for watching afternoon cartoons and Andy Griffith reruns (are you going to call Oscar “Opie? You probably should), and it’s in a retro neighborhood that looks just like the Wonder Years. It even has that washed-out, gold-tinted light of movies from the sixties, with those little black flecks swirling around, and people in that neighborhood kind of jerk around when they move.

I’ve been keeping up with you on the blog but it’s been awhile since I checked it–I did see the Craigsist entry. I’d love to see that boy–you could come down and stay with us in our new house with the pool if we buy it and you, Oscar, Janet, Thomas and Rona could hang out at the pool and watch cartoons in the den. Kevin could come too and he and I might go solve a few crimes.

Did you read Gilead? I remember you being hot on Housekeeping. I never could get through that one–tried again recently, twice–but Gilead I thought was pretty nice. It was a little bit twee, but it had a pretty good groove laid down.

Did you realize it’s been nine years since we’ve seen each other? And we knew each other only less than a year?

LYLARS, Wade

Feb 3, 2005 Kids are indeed a pain in the ass. I’ve been having to sleep with my boy, who’s 2.5, to keep him away from the baby until he (the boy) gets over his cold or fever or whatever he’s got. He’s a rotten sleeper. He wakes up screaming like he’s having Nam flashbacks. Last night wasn’t bad, but the night before that he woke up wailing for “my popsicle! I want my orange popsicle!” He’d had a popsicle the day before but didn’t finish it so we put it in the freezer and now he was disconosolate about it. The same night he woke up a bit later (about 3:45) and insisted that I sing “the Benajamin Bunny song.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I kept trying to get him to prompt me with more clues but he’d only say “Sing the Benjamin Bunny song, Daddy!” I told him I didn’t know the Benjamin Bunny song. He said “Make it up.” So I started singing a song that went something like “Benjamin Bunny, he’s so funny,” etc., and Thomas said, “No! Sing it like on the radio!”

Did you hear about that guy in Lake Jackson, Texas, who died from alcohol poisoning when his wife gave him a sherry enema (at his request)? She gave him two 1.5 liters of sherry up the butt! He was an alcoholic but couldn’t physically drink it anymore because of a throat problem. Damn, that’s hardcore.

Jan. 20, 2005 Rona’s a sweetie, very calm and quiet, nothing at all like our tasmanian devil child. I’ll send you some pictures. Give me your phone number. I couldn’t find you listed anywhere either.

Jan. 20, 2005 Craw-double-daddy has sent you a link to a weblog:

Oscar rocks! That’s almost an anagram. As you know, it is my custom to bestow anagrams on all my friends’ newborn children. Here’s Oscar’s: Rash No Place.

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Oct. 1, 2003

fussy,

Wow, I’m famous! Half-famous anyway. How’d you learn to do that stuff? As my stepdad used to say, before he was dead, “Y’know, that whaddayacallit, that internet thang, that’s the wave of the future.” That was a couple of years ago, and by jove I believe his prediction will prove accurate! But I’m not going to get the bighead and will just write my letters to Fussy and not for the legions of fans sure to be created.

It would be cool to hang out in Ohio, I think. As you know, I don’t go places, but I’d go to Ohio, because Ohio doesn’t seem to make any sense. If you think about it, you can probably name more towns in Ohio than almost any other state. They got a shitload of towns you’ve heard of: Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Canton, Ashtabula (that one’s not really famous, but it’s mentioned in a Bob Dylan song), Youngstown because of Bruce. My point is, you’ve heard of all these towns, and they all sound like they’re pretty good-sized (why else would you have heard of them?)…It just doesn’t make sense that a state that small and so crowded up with big towns could have a border with West Virginia and Kentucky.

I almost forgot. Dayton is another town in Ohio you’ve probably heard of.

Love, Wade

Sept. 3, 2003

dear fussy,

Today I bought a book about how to build your own house. I want to build my own house and get off the grid. If I don’t build my own house I might buy a yurt. There’s this place in Oregon that sells yurts. You can get a 750 square foot yurt for under $10K. You gotta build your own floor. I was thinking you could get two and build them a little ways apart and connect them by a tunnel under the ground and pop out of one and pop up in the next one like a prairie dog. I don’t know why you’d want to do that, but you could.

I’ve never been to New York, or anywhere else, for that matter. I’m sure it’s nice. It’s just that I don’t go places. Why don’t you come here?

Have you noticed that people don’t tell jokes anymore? I bet if you tried to tell somebody a joke they’d just look at you like you were a freak. I don’t mean people don’t say funny things, I just mean they don’t tell jokes.

April 7, 2003

dear fussy,

Did I get drunk and call you Saturday night? Actually, that’s two questions, and I know the answer to the first one, but I can’t remember the answer to the second one. I know I meant to call you. I talked to another friend in California, but I don’t know if I also tried to call you.

It was about one a.m. and I was watching the Spring Praise-A-Thon on TBN, getting progressively more freaked out, because that woman who’s been on those religious shows for years (the 700 Club or the PTL Club, I can’t remember which) HAS NOT AGED A MINUTE! I finally called the number (714/731-1000 if I remember correctly) and talked to the rep who answered and told her how freaked out I was. I asked her what the woman’s name was–it’s Jan Crouch. I said something like she must have made a deal with Satan never to age anymore. The woman was pretty cold to me after that. She said “Good night, sir,” and hung up, not even trying to get any money out of me.

I watched awhile longer and still wasn’t satisfied that I’d gotten the answers I needed, so I called back and got a different rep. He had a bit more of a sense of humor but still didn’t know exactly why I was calling. Neither did I. I was calling for them to tell me why I was calling. I was calling because of that freaky blond haired woman.

Wife and boy are in Scotland right now. I’m going over for two weeks on the 23rd, but right now I’m solo. I’ve been reading a lot. Have you ever read “Stop Time,” by Frank Conroy? It’s a memoir, published in 1967–really good. I’ve also read a novel called “Life at These Speeds” by Jeremy Jackson, also pretty cool. I read a new book called “Growing Seasons,” because I read a review of it in the New York Review of Books, a highbrow publication of which I am an esteemed subscriber–it was okay.

August 5, 2002

fussy!

I am indeed a daddy–he’s two weeks old today. His name is Thomas Preston (after his great-granddaddy, who his daddy is also named after). Seven pounds three ounces, 49 centimeters (we went to a metric hospital, I guess).

Why do people always want to know the baby’s height and weight? You don’t ask other people that information the first time you meet them. He had some hell getting out, but his mama did the whole thing with NO DRUGS and the little chap is all the better for it. Bright red hair and blue eyes, as you can see. He’s a badass. He can already type 35 words a minute. His

accuracy ain’t for shit but cut him some slack. I hope he doesn’t want to play ball or do too much stuff outside and is instead an avid indoorsman like his daddy.

I wish you could have called and had a longer layover–I’d have come picked you up and you could see my badass little redheaded boy.

July 2, 2002

hello fussy,

As you know, I have long dreamed of translating most of the Beatles songs into Spanish (e.g., all but “I Am the Walrus,” “Love Me Do,” and the ones George wrote, except I might do “Taxman,” and several others). I have just completed “Yellow Submarine.” I don’t have accent marks on my keyboard, and words I don’t know in Spanish I just put an “o” on the end of, of course. Also, some words I think I know in Spanish but probably don’t.

Submarino Amarillo

In la ciudad donde naci Vivia un hombre quien viajaba en el mar Y nos dijo de su vida En la tierra de los submarinos

Nosotros vivimos en un submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Nosotros vivimos en un submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo

Y viajamos sobre al sol Hasta descubrimos el mar de verde Y vivimos bajo de agua En la tierra de los submarinos

Nosotros vivimos en un submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Nosotros vivimos en un submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo Submarino amarillo

Y vivimos la vida sin dificultitad Todos de nuestros tenemos todos que necesitamos Cielo de azul, mar de verde En la tierra de los submarinos

[repita el coroso y "fade"]

April 23, 2002

little miss fussy,

Speaking of prize-winning, certified Literature, did you read The Corrections? It took me awhile to get around to it, but I read it last month. It’s an amazingly good book. I was ready to hate it, because I had been embittered by seeing The Lord of the Rings, which was universally raved about in all the right places and which was the WORST GODDAMN MOVIE IN THE WORLD, and it didn’t have an ending and it just made itself up as it went along and in any case there’s only so much of that hobbit shit a man can take, but I was bowled over by The Corrections.

You got your house now? Is it eminently diggable? Send me a picture. Send me a picture of everything, I don’t care what. I need visual stimulation.

By the way, everybody calls me Crawdaddy now, because I sent around an email a couple of months ago informing everybody here at work that that was the only name I would answer to henceforth. It was weird at first, but now everybody has caught on.

We have soured on our house a bit (actually, I always hated it, but I’m speaking in the marital-institutional “we”), but I think it’s because we’re plotting our escape from Houston and all things hot and drab. Houston is hot and drab. It has its moments, like one day when we found these huge plaster of paris president heads down in a grubby warehouse district, just sitting out there for the hell of it, and a bunch of Mexicans building more president heads inside the warehouse–I am very good at my presidents and I could identify all of them, though there’s some question as to whether I misidentified Rutherford B. Hayes as Benjamin Harrison, as though they’re not the same person!–but for the most part Houston is a cesspool.

It’s hotter’n balls here already. Also, another cool thing is this very weird store in our neighborhood called Kaplan’s Ben Hur, which is an ancient Jewish department store that I cannot adequately describe in words. First, how to describe that smell?

It’s not your grandparents’ house, but it’s somebody else’s grandparents’ house, somebody with more money but not that much more. A light, antiseptic, gluey smell. You could wander around that store all day, because it’s pretty big, and not identify a single piece of merchandise. A lot of it is made of glass, I guess, and there were some little racecar things, and the clothes were made of silk with frogs embroidered on them in green yarn, plus the blinky little eyes glued onto the frogs. If you enjoy buying stuff from the Franklin mint you would probably like Kaplan’s Ben Hur. They also sell coffee beans. I haven’t the slightest fucking idea what that store is all about, but there it is. It’s part of the reason we’ve stayed so long and part of the reason we’re trying like hell to leave. When my boy is born (July), I’m going to go buy him something from that store but I’m not going to give it to him until the time is right, whenever that is, and then I’m going to run like hell.

April 22, 2002

fussy, fussy, where are you? Fussy, Fussy, I miss you. Fussy, Fussy, why do you spurn me? Fussy, Fussy, is it because I’m an attorney?

Richard Ford Maddox Ford Maddox Ford Maddox Ford Maddox Ford Maddox Ford . .

James Joyce Carol Oates . . . .

Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson Jeffers(son) Starship Enterprise

The very first song I learned was the Hee Haw song where the guy stands in front of the fake wall and another guy (the mystery guest) stands beside him with his back turned, and the mystery guest turns around to face the audience and join the other guy in singing when the chorus of the song came around:

“Where oh where are you tonight? Why did you leave me here all alone? I searched the world over and thought I’d found true love/ You met another and [raspberry] you were gone.”

At the end of the song the board would seesaw out of the wall and hit the mystery guest on the ass. My mother would never let me do the raspberry sound in my little sister’s face.

The second song I learned was Merle Haggard’s “Daddy Frank,” hands down Merle Haggard’s worst song. It’s about a family of cripples who travels the country in family band (”It weren’t like no ordinary family combo,” Merle sings with great understatement.) Daddy Frank is blind, Mama is deaf, and little sister stands in the corner banging spastically on a tambourine.

When I was four years old we lived in Snyder, Texas, and my dad, who was thirty at the time, was working for an oil field service company seven days a week, but sometimes I’d be in the pickup with him and we’d meet somebody he worked with on the rig, and he’d pull over and make me sing the chorus to Daddy Frank:

“Daddy Frank played the guitar and the French harp/Sister played the ringing tambourine/ Mama couldn’t hear the pretty music/So she read our lips and helped the family sing/That little band was all a part of living/And our only means of living at the time/And it weren’t like no ordinary family combo/Because Daddy Frank the guitar man was blind.”

What a creepy scary song.

What’s the first song you ever learned?

sincerely, wade