The Secrets of Casa Jocasta

In the examination spirit of a few of your favorite essayists--Hazlitt, for example, or Emerson, and of course Montaigne--you pose yourself the rhetorical questions: What is certainty? and What troubles has believing yourself certain about a person, place or thing caused you?

Certainty is the assured sense of error-free inevitability, a circumstance in which no proof or documentation is necessary. The sun will rise in the east and set in the west. Water will boil at 212 Fahrenheit degrees at sea level.

So far as the answer to the second question is concerned, there have been some misjudgments about human responses (including your own) and your ability to do things you were certain you could do (but eventually did not or could not). Adding a note of perplexity, there is the aspect of retrospect, a down-the-road awareness that something you were certain you understood or know or anticipated was in whole or large part wrong, thus the thrust of this essay, which turns out to be about humor. What is funnier than a person, yourself for instance, discovering something he thought to be so was, in contemporary vernacular, so not so?

Your answer to this question addresses the way you see yourself and the world about you, in the frequent, after the fact condition of being told by your present day self that your earlier self was at best naive, at worst delusional. Individuals who present themselves to you as certain or who behave in ways you associate with certainty are thus suspicious. This extends to the extremes of conspiracy theorists, with whom, you might think, you'd find some sympathy, but the escape hatch there is the certainty the conspiracy theorist brings to the table and the imaginative ability of such individuals to extend the reach of the alleged conspiracy.

Perhaps Heraclitus was right about our not being able to bathe in the same river twice. Would this by extension mean we cannot be certain of the same certainty twice?

Following this line of thinking about certainty leads you to a kind of certainty in which you look back at the intent and texture of your earlier stories and longform work, a pattern emerging in which characters are living with a foot in the real world and another in the world of revisiting what seemed so certain in the past. This may be of considerable help as you are currently wanting to reenter the realm of fiction, of invented story, where a thematic tenet is the buried treasure to be discovered. Indeed, one of the projects carries the word Secrets in its title, The Secrets of Casa Jocasta. In Spanish, Casa Jocasta is about as close as one can come to the title Edith Wharton used with such great effect, The House of Mirth. In your plan, Casa Jocasta is the name of a retirement campus for the affluent, speaking with an ironic bite to your belief that what you have already decided is "Act Three of Life's Drama," (how's that for a little parody?)is undercut with the clanks and shuffles of the consequences of Act One and Act Two, the machine shows signs of wear and needs frequent maintenance.

In keeping with the theme of this mini-essay, you've been certain since the idea came to you that The Secrets of Casa Jocasta was a mystery. Certain, do you hear?

If you are correct in your other, more generic certainly, that the novel and short story are voyages on the sea of discovery, what will you discover that will cause you to laugh at yourself?

It's a Mystery to Me

As we are drawn to particular preferences in the things we eat, don't eat, drink, don't drink, and on down the line of pairs of opposites that claim our approval or disapproval, we are draw to a spectrum of story that sates what I like to think of as the mystical appetite of reading taste. This is the literary equivalent of comfort food in the sense that it has the potential of calming, exciting, infusing with nostalgia, transporting us to another era or place or age. As such things go, it is not a rational taste. The more I think about it, investigate its implications, compare it with the things I enjoy writing and actually do write, the more it comes to me that literary taste is quite contrary, bordering on impish and perverse.

We write to fulfill emotional hungers, just as we read to enter the domain of an individual writer and sign on for the chef's taste special.

One such writer awaits in person in a few days. I had been reading Joe Wambaugh from the first of his remarkable publication record. When he last appeared at our writers' conference, it fell to my happy lot to introduce him in is role as featured speaker of the evening. "Joe Wambaugh," I said, "writes the books we wish we'd written." He liked that and went on to say that he wrote books he was glad to have written. Although I had one long-term and warm relationship with a homicide cop, he was a different breed from Wambaugh, his reading tastes running to The Sporting News, Field and Stream, and the L.A. Times his writing tastes ran to field reports and summaries. I mention St. John, for that was his name, as a reference point for my being so fond of Joe Wambaugh's work. I admired St. John, ate and drank with him, But neither that crossing of paths with the man who worde badge Number one from the LAPD nor the opportunity to hang out with Joe Wambaugh explain to my satisfaction my interest in crime-related novels. To my tastes, Wambaugh has a quality greater than is inside knowledge of police work; he has an antic humor that explodes with wit and good humor of the ironic sort I often prefer. Things are not what they seem for any of his cops or civilians. I like Joe Wambaugh novels because his tone and word choice and sense of how relations play out pull me in as though, as though they were comfort food.

Of all his works, fiction and nonfiction, The Mysteries of Harry Bright became the equivalent for me of peanut butter and jam on a thick slab of bread.

Thinking about some of the legendary crime writers I knew, went on the carouse with and/or edited, writers such as Bill S. Ballinger, Day Keene, Bob Turner, Steve Fisher, Frank Gruber, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ken Millar, Bill Gault,Tom Dewey,John Wilder, all of whom I greatly admire, there is that special place for Joe Wambaugh because of that particular flavor he imparts, that edgy humor that pushes the boundaries but does not bleed over into cruelty or gratuitous violence.

The closest to have approached Wambaugh is Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it is my suspicion that Chabon is a fan of Wambaugh.

I have come some distance then in saying Wambaugh writes the books we wish we'd written. Although I think this is still true, I also believe he writes the books we wish we'd read sooner.