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 One morning many years ago I sat at the bus stop and read Thomas Wolfe. Not the skinny man who wears expensive, silly suits that match his dandy personality, but the big guy with messy hair, loose flesh and a fondness for the whistle of trains through a Carolina night.Once upon a time, a callow boy fell in love, then lost the useless girl because he thought too much of serious matters -- this always an impediment to good sex -- and so he ran away from heartbreak and toward self-pity as he wandered through Europe for a year of idle, intellectual months at Mommy's expense. Or maybe that's the story I imagined. The tale I ran through my head seemed more important than the one Wolfe might have told had he been waiting there beside me, and I was young as I read, so no reasonable artist could blame me for my simple comprehension. Today I no longer own that rare combination of time and energy that allows a man to wait at bus stops and read books about the irk of sex we like to call love. Too much about survival on my mind, too much laboring for the man, who is a woman, who acts like a man, who no longer wants to see a distinction. The bus comes and the bus goes, and I enjoy the smell of exhaust. Thomas Wolfe that day was young with me as I waited. He understood train stations better than bus stops, and he knew no more about love than the craving that begins inside one's pants and pretends to be a matter of heart, but somehow he managed to grab enough of his mother's money to traipse around Europe moaning over literature and romance. When my hair was dark, and my penis always hard, I tried the same, but my father scrubbed the trains that Thomas rode, while my mother stayed at home to bake the kids and boil the macaroni; and so I soon ran out of cash; and then the bus arrived to carry me to work. As an old man I work from seven in the morning until five in the evening, five days a week, and oftentimes six. In the darkness I come home to feed the cat, and then I fall asleep while trying to write. On Saturdays I sometimes sit beside the water and wait for Thomas Wolfe to revisit me, but my eyes are tired after just a few pages, and I long ago learned that the bus will likely come tomorrow to take me back to reality, the reality of someone else's demands, demands I must meet in order to pay for the next bus ticket. Love is inside a book, and you have to keep your eyes open long enough to read it. But yo ho ho, tender teens, who needs books anymore? Nowadays e-mail is the banner of a revolution, at least for those who don't have to ride busses and clean latrines. E-mail sagas are so much better than books by Thomas Wolfe, because the neophyte scribbler doesn't need a Maxwell Perkins to tell him that his trunk of pages needs an editor to tame the repetition and correct the spelling errors. Instead each author calls himself Art, and because Art is more important than an employer's demands, he sits at work typing e-mail, which of course turns itself into Art by way of its author's insistence that refinement is a fool's game. His boss? Hell, his boss is busy playing digital solitaire. The guy who rides the bus to work, and the sweats who clean the latrines, they'll do the work. Don't bother me while I'm finding love across the wire. My face is ugly, but my penis is hard. I can't spell, but neither can she, and these days the cathedrals of Europe serve mostly as interruptions to the shopping malls that draw us all together. This we name our sense of digitized community. I write, therefore I am Art. I inherited my parents' money, therefore I own the time and energy to keep my eyes open long enough to write and read my Art. Daddy owns the real job, the artless one that pays the bills, but he doesn't complain, because he's not Art, and I make love to him just often enough to let him know that sitting in front of this computer for hours makes me happy and randy. I divorced, therefore I own a settlement, one that affords me my own, 'flexible' working hours. Call me a home business. Three hours of work, broken up by frequent bouts with digital solitaire and journal entries pushed through the wire. Hand me my digital camera, then watch me take pictures of all you working stiffs. I admire all you working stiffs, because you're fodder for my articles. Without you my Art would own no edge. And it's all Art. And Mommy and Daddy pay for it. If Thomas Wolfe had owned a laptop computer, he might have ushered in the digital age of wordy authors. His trunk's worth of nonsense might have been published in the raw, without the nosey interference of Maxwell Perkins. Thomas might even have found the father for whom he searched, although his father would surely have been too busy cutting gravestones to spend time reading Thomas' e-mail messages. Gravestone cutters have a difficult time keeping their eyes open after hours. NOTA BENE: An earlier version of this article contained some glaring errors regarding who funded Thomas Wolfe's travels through Europe. Thomas may have imagined his daddy cutting gravestones, but it was his mommy -- minor real estate manipulator and manager of her own boarding house -- who gave Thomas his elaborate allowance. I might have remembered this had I re-read those books inside of which I dreamed when I was young (and I should have re-read before I posted this article). I am grateful to Ms. Deborah Borland of the Thomas Wolfe Review, http://library.uncwil.edu/wolfe/twr.htm, for correcting me. Thank you, Deborah. I am honored that you took the time to read. *** Thanks for stopping by to visit us here at SpilledBeans.com. If you'd like to be notified whenever something new is posted to SpilledBeans.com, then please join the Spilled Beans notification list. -- Con affetto, Anthony V. Toscano, Editor SpilledBeans.com  |
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