Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are? Just the Truth, Please.

 Although you do not set forth each day with specific instructions to speak the truth and respond with accurate reflections of how you feel, you have little or no issues so far as telling the truth is concerned.  By this trope, you mean the necessary acts of reporting what you see, think, and feel in direct proportion to the way you see, think, and feel them.

When the subject of telling the truth is present, you are aware that your score for truth telling is far from perfect, that you have with deliberation stretched the truth either to make you look good or in some relevant cases to avoid hurting the feelings of another..

Telling the truth becomes a more serious, even philosophical matter when dealing with characters you've created.  You want them to be true to who they are, which is why, on occasion, when one of them says something, you question it because it does not sound like the character, rather it sounds like you.

 If you are not careful, all the characters you create will sound like you, which puts a strain not only on dramatic intensity but on the larger concept of truth because if each of the characters is different and yet sounds like you, which is telling the truth and which is not?  Yet another question arises:  Are the characters sounding alike because their creator has tried to shout down their individual anarchy?

There are times when you get into this kind of contest within yourself, when you are not composing but in effect holding a meeting of the parliament that seats the varied aspects of you, some of whom are quite conservative, some middle-of-the-roaders, and others rather vocal liberals. 

These parliamentary proceedings begin being run more or less according to Roberts' Rules of Order, but on frequent occasion devolving into a shouting match where the main question has to do with truth.  For instance, "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

When you ask that question of yourself, which is to say of your combined, versatile, multifarious selves, you hope for a truthful answer.  But you know how things can get in the passions of argument.  You do replicate within the parliament of yourself the degrees of the culture into which you were born and with which you have struggles these many long years.  Is it truthful for you to say of yourself that you are a Jew and if the answer is either a yes or a no, what are the attributions?  

You often try to reconstruct from the fact of having been born into what you accept as a Jewish family, having at first greater associations with your birth culture than not.  In your search for identity, you've made serious attempts at pursuing the trail of a cultural identity, have never lied about your birth connection nor tried to pass as someone who is of no religious culture.

Some of these speculation arrive because you are rereading Chaim Potok's moving novel, My Name Is Asher Lev.  The novel of course resonates for you because Potok is a Jew, Asher Lev is a Jew, and in its profound and nuanced way, the Jewish culture radiates from the pages.  Yet none of these reasons is the real reason you are rereading the novel.  

The novel you've just finished rereading, Young Man with a Horn shares a relationship with you, with Asher Lev, and your reasons for rereading both.  Each book is about a serious performer, one a painter, the other a musician.  Each is about the process of a fictional individual becoming more real than many live humans because the fictional ones are in effect trying to become one with his chosen art.

In many ways, you're as curious about this process as you are about the culture you're trying to accommodate in some truthful way beyond mere name.  You know a good deal more about being a writer than you do about being a Jew.  But this is only one case where your background has produced an anomaly;you know X amount about writing on a scale of Y.  Whatever that X is, it leaves you wandering about, seeming smarter than you are.  Or perhaps seeming more desperate than you are?

Since the subject at hand is truth, then, truth to tell, perhaps you are the way you appear as a result of all those parliamentary meetings when the investigating committee calls you to testify.  Once you are sworn in, promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, etc etc, and you are asked the first question, "Who the fuck do you think you are?" you begin writing a story to find out.

When Surprise Trumps Story Points

Two characters of equal ability are assigned a chore to perform.  At the moment, their age, gender, and background don't matter.  In the moments to come, perhaps all these qualities will matter.  Perhaps not.

We'll call the individuals Character A and Character B.  The individual assigning the task repeats the details of the task, acknowledged how ASAP the time frame is, then says "Go."

Character A, who has been smiling with confidence while the details of the chore were specified, smiles again, says something along the lines of "Piece of cake.  Stand back."

Since there are two characters in this exercise, a significant binary event has been created.  Without needing to hear or consider Character B, you can see two potential outcomes, based on years of reading, listening to critics talk about story, your experiences as a teacher, your experiences as a fiction editor, and by no means deserving the bottom of the triangle, your experiences as someone who had to undergo considerable struggle to be able to get a dramatic narrative to stand up to revisiting and the rigors of editorial work.

Productive writers tend to be like that, suspicious, cynical, curious.  The more productive they've been, the greater their index of potential cynicism and wariness.  The writer has the equivalent of the musician's memory for sound.  

In a class in music appreciation which was the prerequisite to a more nuanced approach to types of harmony and orchestration, you were subjected to an identify-that-work kind of test, which was making you impatient for having to engage in a simplistic strategy.  Using a turntable and a stack of 33 1/3 RPM vinyls, the instgructor would place a work on the turntable, then lower the stylus.

More often than not, you got the identity after the first two or three notes.  Sometime, you required several bars, but to the instructor's exasperation, you continued to be able to identify the tune.  Finally, she came to one, watched with some satisfaction as you remained silent, and no one else was able to recognize the work.  She smiled a patronizing smile in your direction.  "I seem,"  she said, "to have stumped you."

"Actually, you haven't.  I know the piece is one of the Brandenberg Concerti, I'm trying to decide which number."

Had her previous comment to you not have been so arch and accusatory, there would have been no humor, but when you said, "I'm going to go with Number Four, which would be the G Major.  I seem to recall the beginning with the two recorders in a kind of cheery lock step." Even those in the class who'd never heard of any of the Brandenberg Concerti, much less Number Four, did not merely laugh, they guffawed.

The teacher had set herself up for a cheap-shot win with her attitude, but she lost considerable face.  Audiences of any age are only too willing to laugh when an authority figure stumbles.  The authority figure may be an individual or an ingenious role reversal as executed by Charlie Chaplin in a routine where as a boxer, he comes out of his corner at the bell, then begins dancing behind the referee, adjusting his movements so that he is always behind the ref until he gets a chance for a quick pop to the jaw of his opponent.

Character B, listening to the assignment, says, "Gee, that seems pretty difficult.  I don't know that I can do that."

You know immediately who you're going to root for, and you can see possible scenarios in which the story can go.  If well orchestrated, these scenarios will have Character A's smile growing even broader, the possibility of Character B shaking his or her head in frustration.

Most authors who have read enough are also aware of the potentials for mischief that become apparent to you as the two opposing characters, A and B, take on traits related to their behavior.  Much depends of the apparent near-perfect performance of Character A, yet the shrewd reader will understand that A cannot be allowed to win because were A to perform successfully, the result would not be a story,  Call it what you will; it is not a story.

On the other hand, B must not be allowed to win too easily.  We need to have reasonable fear that A might win.  The trick is to get Character B to completing the chore, doing so with infinitely more grace and imagination than A.  The key to this performance, B's performance, rests entirely in the shadow of that great dramatic force called surprise.  The outcome must be plausible, must be logical, must come as the result of some surprise activity, information, or a combination of both.

The Reliable Narrator and Roquefort Cheese

In story and actual history, so much depends on the reliability of the narrator.  If you as reader or composer are not convinced of the reliability, much of the transformative chemistry that makes story seem real and reality seem dramatic will dissipate, leaving you with rows of sentences on numerous pages, or a sense of remoteness from events taking place about you.

A character who claims to be you is napping in a comfortable chair in the corner of your room until he is awakened by one of the great dramatic tropes, a knock on the door.  You live in a circumstance where you are insulated from street traffic.  

The likelihood of a knock at your door at any time is rare. more often than not either from your landlady or her son, who fixes things when they don't work or replaces things he can no longer fix.  He is a ten in reliability on a scale of one to ten.

Your next door neighbor, who leaves you copies of National Geographic for reasons you do not quite understand, rarely knocks; she merely leaves the magazine on a table in your patio.  An occasional postal worker or FedEx driver will knock to deliver a package.  

In all the time you've lived here, there have been few other knocks.  Once a person with a clip board seemed to think you knew and were hiding the whereabouts of a former tenant.  Once a friend of your landlady wished to leave a message for her with you.  Once an earnest couple wearing dark suits wanted to know if you'd found Jesus.

Given the variety of things you've written while living here, anyone would think--and do so wrongly--that a great deal of dramatic and existential activity takes place here.  Online your imagination and dreams.  

Under such circumstances, you'd have no problem accepting the reality of the character who claims to be you, napping in a chair except for the fact that you know he is not completely reliable because you know he is not you.  You know this because you know someone else is already using your ID.  In fact, you know he is not you because you happen to be you.

On the other hand, you've created several hundred characters, some of whom you've given names you know to be owned by persons you know to be actual persons.  Using the names of persons you know to be real for characters you know to have been invented is a mischievous whim on your part.  You have also given yourself names of the sort people think of as pseudonyms, thus adding to the cosmic mishigas of identity. 

 Well before there was an Internet or a Google, you wrote a number of books as Adam Snavely, which sounded borderline fantastic to you and definitely funny.  The fact is, you have just checked Internet and Google to find the Adam Snavely

of your invention is not even on the first page of Adam Snavely listings.  There are too many real Adam Snavelys for your Adam Snavely to have a chance at all in the world.  What's worse, the real Adam Snavelys are not funny.

Suppose the character who claims to be you hears a knock at the door, opens it, then finds himself confronted with a character asking for you.  Situations such as this have happened to you in dreams,  Faced with a seemingly impossible problem, you woke up, your sleeping imagination not willing to cope with the equivalent of circumstances you enter with some frequency when you are writing stories.

In recent years, you've coped with the need to get as much of the real you or the storytelling you out of the manuscript, leaving the characters you've invented to cope with the problems you sought to investigate as yourself.

The reader expects knocks at the door in story.  The knocker is more often than not an irritation, a threat, or a menace.  In real life, the knocker may be any or all of these things, but the greater possibility is that the knocker will be a nuisance.

In story, the knocker asks the character who claims to be you for information about you.  The character who claims to be you lies.  You might even ask, Why stop now?  This character lied in the first place by claiming to be you.  How reliable can he be if he is trying to impersonate someone he cannot even recognize when he sees him in person?

And you sit there and tell me the writing life is as shot through with excitement and challenge as Roquefort cheese is shot through with blue mold.  You sit there, pretending to be reliable.

The Best Characters Know a Thing or Two about Salami

There has to be a story, of course; something simple enough, a journey or a quest or even a decision to rob a bank.  The story has to have at least an atmosphere of plausibility to it, and characters, who add one of the more vital ingredients to the mixture.  

The better characters are those who bring some sort of explosive quality, like guests bringing improvised gifts to a social gathering or a dinner that irrevocably effects the event. These characters could be, probably have been, your cohorts in your fantasies; they are the men and women with whom you'd like to have more than one drink, perhaps even several.  

These are men and women who are up to no good, nor are they up to badness in particular.  To paraphrase the language of lawmakers, these characters are a clear and present danger to convention.  By charm and by the strength of their inner conviction, they subvert, co-opt, and upstage any pretense of the ordinary.

Ventures such as these, whether you are in the process of reading them or writing them, hold great joy and promise for you because they set the stage for a result you value of all others, the result of chemistry, often unanticipated, between characters or that special chemistry not even the author had planned.  

This unplanned chemistry is the author, liking the circumstances, and the author, in consequence, alert to the one or two moments in early draft where unexpected responses come forth.

The author is not, you believe, supposed to get in the way once the characters have been set loose on their wind-up orbits, but if your own experiences are any gauge, the author will sometimes see details the characters may have missed.  The author will in metaphor see a character a banana peel, which yanks him right out of refereeing the story, intent on the banana peel on which one or more characters will slip.

You did say metaphor.  The banana peel is the cue sent to the author's mischief center:  one or more of your characters are going to lose dignity soon.  They will do so by some unanticipated response to some unanticipated detail within the story, a word or two from another character, a zipper allowed to remain unzipped, a letter not sent, a microphone not turned off, a photo that should not be carried in a wallet being carried in the wallet it should not be carried in.

Some directors you know of like the idea of letting characters go off on an improvisational riff to see what kinds of possible chemistry there are between them.  Uta Hagen, an actor you much admire, writes of having been in a stage play with a famed actor who managed to leave a dead fish under a pillow on which she was supposed to be sleeping.  

You, an ardent fan of Marx Brothers vaudevillian antics, were inspired to have a long salami hidden in your prop overcoat, worn during a supposed tense scene in a play where your character was accused of being stingy and self-centered.  You can still recall the look on your accuser's face when you withdrew the salami, then handed it to him.

Much as you admire pranks and the discovered chemistry between two or more characters, this is not the end you had in mind when considering the overall outcome when a story is drawn away from the conventions of presentation and plunked instead into dramatic anarchy.  

The outcome of which you are fondest is the arrival of authorial voice, certainly in your own work but also in the stories and novels of writers long dead, still among the living, and in some cases considerably younger than you.

Much as you admire being swept along in the slipstream of a deceptively simple language, although one you recognize as having been crafted with a careful eye, you admire even more a conversational sense of being in the presence of a driven, purposeful character, close to the edge of being a lit fuse, sizzling toward some form of detonator.

Straightforward or orotund, as fraught with metaphor as a Christmas pudding or Italian Panetone, the narrative voice comes whistling through the canyons of your mind as hot and impatient as a summer Santa Ana wind, stirring up associations, impressions, and the urge to join in.

The men and women of whose works you are the fondest tend to use this quality of narrative voice as heat-seeking missiles.  On impact, they shatter the ordinary, link you to the world of their creator where you become aware of the mischievous associations spinning through your being since you were old enough to stop being so damned literal, then walk through the ghetto streets of your mind where you would not ordinarily go for fear of being solicited to ride shotgun in your own story.

Someone interesting has to want something, but someone more interesting has to come along with enough force to impact the direction of the story and the polite comfort of its vector.  The language of the narrative, dialogue, and interior monologue will become aware of this interesting force, then outdistance themselves as they weave the silken webs of intrigue.

There are already enough stories with polite comfort.  What you're waiting for is one of your characters to hand you a salami. 

   

Portraif of the Artist as Pin-Ball Machine

When you are teaching at UCSB, you make a point of arriving early to spend some time, sitting in the darkness of The Old Little Theater, just across a hallway from your classroom.  In the solitude and darkness, you find a sense of companionship with elderly presences representing all the wonderfully good and terribly bad things you have seen in your theatergoing time.

Not until you experienced Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, the night after having seen Streetcar in a larger, more robust and modern building did you sense your pleasure for the intimacy of the smaller theater and thus your complete enjoyment of the smaller because smaller means you have to use more of your imagination as you watch the story.

Earlier this week, you experienced another revelation about how such elements as story, venue, imagination, and the disconnect from convention collide within your sensory awareness.  As if in a trance, you stood to indulge the entr'acte of the National Theater filmed presentation of Hamlet, coming to you in a movie theater in, of all places, Ventura, California.  

This was an embellished theater, much larger and grander than the one you'd sometimes attend when you were working the carnival circuit, staying at a cheap hotel just around the corner.

You were drawn to a large bank of pin ball machines and imaginative stalls where one could play elaborate video games.  You felt as though you were in one of the pin ball machines, with its flashy arrays of bumpers, flippers, culs de sac, and diversions.  The idea of going to Ventura to see Shakespeare in such an arcade of a theater was enough to shake you out of convention.

Most of the Shakespeare plays you've seen have been filmed although you are not a stranger to the tragedies, histories, and comedies being presented in a theater.  This version of Hamlet was set in the alternate universe of a time frame somewhere between the first Hamlet you'd seen and perhaps the nineteenth century, except that in the famous "The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King," Hamlet is wearing a Grateful Dead concert tee shirt, and a closer look reveals his footwear to be running shoes.

The experience was far from disconcerting or distracting, instead seeming to ratify your own vision of yourself and the world about you at considerable remove from the you that was and the world about you that was.  Now that you think about it, whenever you took the world as it was presented to you at school and most of the supplied text books, you were buying into closed roads, dead end streets, boring or patently sugar coated decorations.

If not the first disconnect between reality and the fugue state of the surreal came when, as an eleven-year-old, you were living in Miami Beach, Florida, which had been used by the Army as a training and service center during world War II.  You did quite well for yourself by selling out-of-town newspapers to service men, that is until one afternoon, when a troupe of recruits was dismissed from drill.  In their midst, you recognized an actor you recognized from his role in many films, often as a desperado of some sort, and in recent years, either as a German officer or enlisted man.

"Would you have," he asked you, "papers from Los Angeles?"

"Examiner,"  you said.  "Times."

"Ah,"  he said.  "Not the Daily News?"

"You?  The Daily News?"

He registered amusement in his eyes and the set of his jaw, lips slightly parted.  "I see you know your Los Angeles papers.  Why would I not want the Daily News?"

"Because the Daily News is--"

"Yes?"

"The Daily News is friendly to labor.  The Times hates unions.  The Examiner is a Hearst paper.  You portray people who--"

His eyes locked on me.  "You recognize me. How old are you?"

You told him.

"I am not always the type of person I portray.  You must learn to understand.  Things are not always what they seem."

You are pleased to recall that incident.  You are formed by such encounters as that and the event, real and imagined, that cause you to question your own attitudes and beliefs as well as those of others you took in without examining them.

Each time you see or read Hamlet, you see a four-hundred-year-old reality, shaped by younger ensembles of actors and directors, cracking open any sense that reality has a use by date.  Each time you confront an ancient or elderly truth, you see it in the lobby of a theater that has undergone much change in your lifetime, as indeed you have, too.

The Writer's Rabbit Hole

Back in the tumultuous days of your tumble into the rabbit hole of the writing life, you were on an extreme learning curve without even knowing such a thing as a learning curve existed.  

You would later find out about the term "learning curve" from an employer with whom probabilities suggested you would not get along, which is your attempt to avoid saying you were fated not to get along, you with him and him with you.

This is also an attempt to say that your experiences with this employer and your regard for the term "learning curve" to the contrary notwithstanding, you have no objection to the learning process.  Once inside the rabbit hole of the writing life, you understood how your appearance there was not by any means so accidental as the eponymous Alice, nor was it long before you progressed enough to learn that Alice had a real life counterpart, Alice Liddell.

You'd in effect spent some time looking for the rabbit hole, wanting some sense of how to recognize which of your habits and ambitions were worthwhile and which were insubstantial.

You also understood the need to learn your way about this wonderland of publishing and writing was through more reading, more attending of lectures, and more practice, which had two specific activities, the practice of reading and writing in the manner of writers you admired and did not like, and the practice of writing in the manner as close to being you as you were able to discern. 

Even at this remove, you see your more callow self as having understood the need for learning.  You attended lectures given by such notables as Malcolm Cowley, Irving Stone, Adela Rogers St. Johns, and Lionel Trilling as adjunct to your attending classes at the university, pleased to discover among your instructors men and women with considerable reputations, bodies of work, and opinions.  These latter elements you accepted as though they were gospel until their clamor of contesting opinions pushed you deeper yet into the rabbit hole,

There was nothing for it.  Your flashlights were losing their battery power.  Your candles were mere stubs, and although you smoked at the time, thus the regular presence of a lighter or matches, you began to suspect you were going to have to make your own choices, then live with the consequences of these choices if recognized authorities should disagree with you.  By the time you'd progressed to the point where you discovered there was such a thing as a learning curve, you'd already understood there was a bell curve.  

You have come at this stage of your life to understand that your distrust of and antipathy toward learning curves was based on the emotions surrounding your relationship with the individual from whom you discovered the term. This realization comforts you while assuring you that you have learned at least this much.

During your time in the rabbit hole of the writing life, you have seen an array of characters every bit as eccentric as those Alice saw in her rabbit hole.  You even saw in the chair of your department a prototype of the Mad Hatter, a man who also wore a vest much of the time and, in his lecture about Alice, clapped his hands together before asking a question that has remained with you ever since.  "How did the little girl get into the rabbit hole?"

At one point, early on, you believed it might be enough to say in effect, "Here I am."  Of course you needed a portfolio of work, a cornucopia of material demonstrating your range, whereupon you would be hired to produce a story or play or novel.  A journal might ask for a satire or parody.  You might even get one or two regular retainers, which everyone understood was the writer's way of earning a living.

A few individuals did say, "Oh, you're here, are you?" And you were a regular participant at a baseball game at which most of the players were members of the Writers' Guild.  No question about you being confused for one of the neighborhood kids who were chosen to fill in at empty positions.  One of the regulars said center field was yours whenever you wanted it.

What you had to learn was to be the rabbit hole character of your own true calling; you could not get far at all by being the Mad Hatter because he was already there, and if you weren't careful, he'd want to hit you up for ten dollars at a time when you knew how to stretch a ten-dollar bill into a crock pot of chili that would have you eating for a week.

You had to learn what you could from the men and women whose works you read, how they had effect on you, and what those effects caused you to think about during those unguarded moments when asleep, playing center field, shaving, or deciding what to add to the crock pot that would change the chili into something more intriguing and provocative.

You had to learn to walk those rabbit hole tunnels without hunching over or using body language suggestive that you did;t belong there.  Somewhere in that strange world where some did not trust their agents or publishers or producers, where the faults always belonged to the editors who said no, or to the so-called ideal reader (the one in Peoria), you had to walk tall, because you had a story you could tell.  Even if there was no one  to listen, you knew it was good, because the thought of telling it made you smile.

The Writer's Best Friend: Pickles from His Youth

Among your favorite writers, the works of John Cheever (1912--82) continue to lead you through those special moments of humor found between the sighs, groans, and complaints of those whose lives are as conflicted as Cheever's was.  Another of your favorites, Deborah Eisenberg (1945-) has you laughing out loud in places where you find yourself startled to discover something funny in the midst of driven, notional behavior.  

He who remains most favored, Mark Twain (1835-1910), causes you to laugh at his persistent target of persons, places, and things not being at all what they seem to be.  So majestic is Twain's sweep of targets, he has taken on an entire part of speech, the noun.  At one point in your career, you realized that you, too, had taken on a part of speech, the adverb, but what is an adverb in comparison to a noun.

Adverbs modify, which is to say prop up, verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.  If it is of a mind, an adverb will also modify a noun phrase or a clause, perhaps even an entire sentence.  These last chores reflect enough subtlety to cause you to take back much of what you have said about the adverb and allow it a place at the dinner table, so long as it does not try to be the schoolyard bully of dialogue, where he said loudly or she demurred politely.  And you can manage to keep your control in cases where, if you come any closer, I will shoot, she said threateningly.

From Twain, more so than Cheever or Eisenberg, you have learned to be wary of nouns, of persons, places, and things, until they have proved themselves to be reliable,  at which point you scurry about, looking for other targets.  On balance, you have chosen well, looking to them as pole stars, teachers of places to insert moments of humor where they will provide the most effect.

When you speak of humor, you think of revelations of sad truth.  Thus it becomes a sad truth that fun and good times cannot last, perhaps even more humorous and funnier to think there could be fun times or good times.  

You don't  want people telling you to soak it up now because you might be dead tomorrow.  You had difficulty enough reaching today, and even though you are grateful to be here and alive today, you have a feeling, a gut-level feeling, as in the kinds of gut-level feelings expressed by a man who once fired you for favoring hunch decisions over rational ones.  

The sad truth there was your hunches having had a better payoff than your rational decisions.  The sad truth grew sadder and, thus, funnier, because of your belief that the inmates were running the institution.  From this spiral of deterministic behavior, irony grows in the same way mushrooms grown in unaccustomed places.

Unless you are at the moment caught up in a spiral of downward, painful information, your tendency is to look for things you consider fun, which, for the sake of definition here, is a state of being you often equate with impudence.  You can have fun without being impudent.  For example, you can enjoy a leisurely dinner and conversation with friends, which is not impudent so much as it is fun.  You can also do impudent things for the explicit purpose of taking down some noun,some person, place, or thing.

John Cheever has written a short story, "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear."  He has also written Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel.  On frequent occasion, you turn to such sources, drawn to the notion of listing such things.  At one time, when you had no lists of your own, you took comfort from the potnetials your imagination gave you.  Some of these potentials remain, others still have half lives.

You remember well the times when the mere mention of Walla Walla (Washington) brought you gales of laughter.  The memory still provokes a smile.

You still believe it would be a grand idea to write a novel called The Furmious Bandersnatch, and having done so, you'd need as well to write a sequel, The Vorpal Blade, a tribute to Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky.

Whild standing in line at the now vanished Village Delicatessen or VD in Westwood Village, the small town that grew around UCLA, you heard the woman in front of you tell the counterman, "I see you have the pickles of my youth."  That was many years ago, but the phrase still has the resonance of nostalgia and the humor of irony.  How glorious to equate pickles with one's youth. You still have the long narrative poem you were driven to write, "The Pickles of My Youth."

Much of your early writing had characters caught upon treasure hunts, where the prize was some element of whim that appealed to your sense of expansive freedom.  One such story had a number of individuals in competition for a Kosher Zion salami, another for a picnic basket filled with French bread and deviled eggs, and "enough champagne to wash them all down." 

You can still hear some of your earlier, imperfectly formed characters, clamoring for your intention, offering you advice on everything from yo-yo strings and drum sticks to false mustaches and bakeries where the most improbable and delicious pies may be had.  For the longest time, you found it difficult to write about anything that did not have a direct payoff in fun; the anything could even be some poem of e.e. cummings, with the remarkable line, "Damn everything but the circus."

You can also hear voices about you, their questioning growing more intense, "When are you going to get serious?  When are you going to settle in to serious writing?"

At this point in your life, the pickles of your youth firmly in mind as you make your way into a booth at Art's Deli, tingling with anticipation when the waitress places a bowl of crisp, lime-green pickles before you, barely having given up the ghost of being a cucumber, you have reached one of the happy places you know to return.

Other such places are those where you write to produce things that will cause your grin to explode into outright laughter.