Errata (2 page)

On the other hand, neither do I want this to drip-by-drip into a protracted illumination, in that it’s more than enough for the situation to be in stasis, much less that my writing have an inability to lurch toward completion.  It’s acutely necessary to write, hone, and then deposit the notebook in the place before, well, before it’s too late for it to serve its purpose.  I’m in a hurry, so if you’re inclined to take issue with the way this is all laid out, then walk your criticism elsewhere.  The number 22 has been of mind lately, so 22 days seemed a reasonable time restriction.  Eve ended at 22.  Hannah was 22 when we met and she emphasized that there are also 22 cards of the Major Arcana, wishing the correlation to her age could remain, although she would’ve already turned 23 by now.  It took a moment, working with 3’s and 5’s to justify 22, but I came up with a single arrangement.  Two 5’s and four 3’s.  Five, ten, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-two.  Such a period of time should suffice to release all of this to you.  I’m anticipating that telling the beard, the cover for the story, the story around the story, will work to release the blocked parts that are so aggrieving.  It was unintended, but since the writing period decision, a cab fare randomly mentioned that the early Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets contained 22 letters, so I consider that a confirmation.  Call it a disposable rationale if you must, but there’s strength in accumulating synchronicities. 

Assuming the notebook’s been discovered, as you make your way through it (consider it no more than a notebook, as it certainly isn’t a nicely-wrapped collection of polite meditations), realize that I don’t claim to be a mind plunger, gaunt from releasing an appetite of epiphanies.  I’m certain of my bookish background, but that’s it.  Though my confidence lies in the latter role of the reader, I’m uncertain of my ability beyond that of a simple scribe, if I can execute on the former side of the page.  How I then presume to write is as follows.  If one cannot read (not meaning as a bar of literacy but that of cultivated activity), viewing the written word as alive to do all the work, the entire examination, then one cannot write.  If instead one expects the give and take, to engage in thoughtful reciprocation, to view a book as a mostly-full vessel that each reader must in turn complete, then with enough time and effort, it seems that this type of reader has the potential to also write in kind.  Or not.  And though I’m not claiming to be a writer, surely you, whoever you are, you who were not the one who strained to dig up this notebook but instead the one who waited non-perspiring to have it handed over, you can’t claim to be much of a reader since police reports hardly count.  So please don’t think of me as the kind of steadily endeavoring blessed authorial culprit that some might admire, but instead one who has read enough to roughly lace together the triggers of thought that loop and tighten.  No more than clumsily trying to slip a few sentences into the pause of the chimes.

Day 4

The glass implies the bottle, likewise the text implies its author, so today I’ll address the purpose of the 3:00 A.M. writings.  Why jot down an entry a day for barely over three weeks and then spend another week rewriting, in a manner of speaking?  Sure, action was necessary.  Dance or drown.  But there are other ways to break the monotony of waiting, buoys to cling to, other means to distract from private purgatory (though apparently no other ways for a sleep aid), but I’m both intending to explain how the situation came to be, as well as to decipher and amend expected misperceptions of my role in it.  Meaning, I’m not guilty.  This is desperation, not an enlightened tactic.  Don’t expect any surprising profundity or for me to unravel the mysteries of the morning.  No clinched business here.  Instead, repair damaged logic.  Readjust my presence.  Maybe help to develop eventual foresight. 

In the meantime, this is a serious correction, like an errata slip tipped-in or inserted inside the front cover of a book, although my errata go beyond the usual shifts of tense, punctuation errors, incorrect articles used, or misspellings.  Instead of typos, I’m attempting to correct evidence that points to my culpability.  Frankly, my concerns have a much larger sense and a necessity of immediacy than book-based errata, and for that reason the reversal of time has become fundamental in the early morning ritual of recording my impressions of these events.  Don’t expect a confession of confidence.  This is a specimen of afflicted truth.  The pain of advancing sour knowledge.  But no vanity of suffering.  No hyperbole of decline.  I fear though that all of this may appear opaque beyond what it actually reveals (Who wouldn’t seek out diminishing transparency after a coarse stab at revealing the tangled garden of a secret life?), that the tenuous letters are more heartily assertive than they initially seemed in declaiming a silent code of which I’m not aware.  Very well.  Consider this a document of five characters.  Since the text seems to be a creature that launches its maker, let the letters serve as both character and key, because I firmly expect to hit a bend in the road while writing this.  My life is already at another bend, the fold of the paper cutout, which is to say the suspended middle, the in between zone, which is also to say the roadblock of life rather than writing.  Life is not a document.  Life cannot be documented.  Documents cannot be lived.  The writing process is at odds with reconciling life and living sensibly.  All I can do is immerse myself and write with abandon to make sense of the situation, and literally try to scrawl myself to sleep, the errata notebook a line to grasp onto for the sake of saving my neck and to be pulled back to my previous reality. 

I can’t keep the notebook here in my apartment as a memento of my itch, that much is realized (I thought about using the false-bottomed box that I hide intrinsic-valuables in, but layers are slight and it only takes one person to realize what lies below the surface), but neither does it exist to burn or throw out.  I understand full well where it needs to go, what its proper role is, but that means returning to the place, the place I shouldn’t return to, but where I need to go back and check.  If I go back to the place for a second time, my nature will likely compel a cycle of going back.  At the same time, it’s the best location for the notebook since both it and the current inhabitant, the catalyst who put all of this into motion, imply each other.  The errata book needs to have time for stillness and rejuvenation as much as I do.  Let the book sleep, have its proper rest. 
Call the burial, dirt rest.

Day 5

The influence and shining view of my childhood friend Eve is never far away.  Various memory clusters of her pursue me.  They unexpectedly appear and overpower senses of the moment, replacing the present with versions and memories of her, seemingly never an end to each succeeding recall.  She was a few grades beyond me and, though the other older kids were interested in their youngers only for the sake of ridicule, Eve often needed to stay back and rest.  No one (especially teachers and parents) spoke to her as if addressing a child, if at all, but instead like she were in her last days, bed-ridden in a convalescent home.  The effect of this must have aged her, not in chronological years, but in a timeline of weightiness.  I suspect her need for continual rest was intensified by this weight she must’ve carried around, outsized upon her slight frame.  She surmised the immoderation of a fellow bookworm a few houses away, intuited that I was a mutual non-participator insatiable for the written word, and of the type to eventually go on immoderately rather than talking in tiptoe.  She wasn’t carefree in the way of most children, because she was born with a weak heart, which required four surgeries by the time she graduated from high school.  Eve was rarely publicly maudlin about this, and never showed elevated consternation.  Despite my fool’s crush on her, Eve, pretty with dark curly hair and of a captivating speculative spirit, was essentially the big sister I never had, crucial at amending and maneuvering me through my parent’s limited scope and the impairing effect of coming of age in a city with a pinched cast of mind.  As if it’d been a considered intervention all along, she was the one who pruned my green sapling of budding irrelevance and exposed me to aesthetic concerns, to films, music, and literature, always literature, never with pretension (for she prostrated her knowledge).  My parents considered her influence the audacity of pagans, though her politics especially riled them, seeing Eve as plotting to hinder and squash the involuntary morals they believed were bred in me.  Eve is responsible for my either/or question bedrock, Raymond, do you want to look back on your life and think, at least I watched a lot of television?  She was no striver by any means and felt that most accomplishments were hollow, but neither was she a nihilist or regressive, more a champion of hard-fought individualism.  She emphasized that the options were not bland maturity or a continuous immaturity.   There was another way. 

We started to grow apart around the time that my forced extra-curricular activities of band, track, cross country, church youth group, and a part-time fast food restaurant job left little free time for visiting (this marked a shift in my position from being mentored to following the stirrings of self-guided seeking, resulting in an eventual deeper unity between us despite a descent in our ongoing friendship at the time), but I knew she’d gotten an after-school job at the neighborhood library branch and pictured her there, occasionally appearing aloof but only tired, recommending titles and authors in her sweet understated but critically convincing way.  Down the line, when I returned from college, our friendship was rekindled and it was clear that she was interested in no more than the platonic connection as before.  Eve’s congenital condition was critical enough that she was born into a life of limitations, needing more rest than her grandparents and not expecting to outlive them, but when she left this world, it wasn’t with a weak mind, and any of us can do well to say the same.  There was always an end to Eve, and perhaps that admittedly gruesome poetic quality heightens her memory, of a baby born with a defective organ. 

I often feel like it’ll take me at least 20 years from now to reach age 30, and as my own time seems elongated, it’s unfortunate that additional years weren’t granted to Eve, extending her heart a meager few years longer, allowing her wide-eyed expression when flipping through a new book and cradling it lovingly to remain in this world and infect it a few years longer.  I don’t have the generosity of spirit to be Eve, in fact her memory is rebuking, but since I know that she considered purgatory any place without pages, the only act I can perform in her name to pay tribute is live the reader’s life, and with all my wishing facilities, imagine her content in a house of books.

Day 6

A job search is one of the few situations in which a terribly low percentage is acceptable and satisfying.  Fifty resumes can be sent out and as long as one employer responds and hires you, it’s ended well. I can’t abide by bad odds, though.  It’s the reason I don’t gamble. It makes little sense to throw away money and time or be painfully humbled dealing with the whole job process, even the New Orleans version. Instead, I became a cabbie, a hack, not a particularly commanding position, but a necessity in a tourist town.  This change initially provided the solace of impunity.  I’d been an English and Literature teacher in the public schools, so the idea of setting my own schedule and making enough by putting in a few hours a day sounded pleasing, as well as providing an appropriate balance of experience to the hermit’s path.  I turned 25.  Rent’s cheap.  I have few bills and live simply, so why not?  More time for reading and volunteering with a local tutoring organization.  After being restlessly cooped up in a classroom, the taxi path appealed with a whiff of freedom to it, so I walked around, studied the cabbies, noted where the main cab stands were, tried to listen in on their conversations and dispatch calls, observed which downtown blocks often got fares, measured how often the different companies’ cars passed through, and then came to the following.  If I took my old Ford four-door, printed two large magnets, one for each side, made an official-looking cabbie license, bought a CB and a meter, and went out after dark, varying up my streets, enveloped in the crowd, then I could pull it off, have potential fares (all of them wave-me-down corner jobs) think I’m legitimate.  I’d work limited enough so that the other cabbies wouldn’t pick up on it, especially since I’d occasionally be scooping up their customers ahead of them.  Not out too late, though, since I’m not particularly nocturnal, at least on the early side of night.  If by chance the taxi cab bureau caught up to me, I’d take care of it with a little cash and several half-truths.  It’s easier to have guile when you don’t look like you do.  I’m a serious and prudent-seeming young man and my race makes a difference, sorry to say.  I take fares into my confidence and explain that I’m in the family business, working my way through college, because whether or not they ask outright (Who doesn’t have one’s own concerns to focus on, after all?), it’s apparent that I can set their minds at ease with strong manners and by offering a plausible explanation.  It’s what they want to hear, even if they don’t believe me and conclude that I’m merely superior at being inferior.  Plus, I get better tips.  It bridges them past their immediate concern of why a non-immigrant Caucasian is in this line of work.  You can be a middle-aged white man hack, but the fares see me as what they don’t want their sons to turn to, as if I’m equal parts chauffeur/psychotherapist/tour guide/dealer/pimp/wrangler of drunks/delivery boy, which is partly true.  On the other hand, a waiter, clerk, or bartender are all temporarily acceptable positions for their children, positions that will be fondly looked back upon as the jobs of the salad days, but a cabbie?  No esteem.  No one does a job like this if he’s my age, my background, and sane.  I’m too young to be what they perceive as a hard luck desperate case.  So, family business is my line.  Little do they know that I have a bachelor’s degree.  I’d privately dabbled with rejecting a formal career path ever since graduation, so the announcement of reassignments and no paychecks for a month was the push I was looking for.  We were a step from the end of the school year anyway.  My fellow teachers were frustrated and angry, the ones like me who held little seniority and therefore little recourse (collateral damage pawns of school board and contractor corruption), but I considered it an unexpected release.  The chance to step away, so why not?  Resignation on the spot.  Finally the break from the conviction of vocation.  No longer tamed by my father.  A lifetime school teacher like him no longer my reality.  The buttoned-up journey over.  Forced to find an alternate plan, that’s why I decided to be a cabbie, but one without all the licensing and fees.  A rash pursuit perhaps, but prudence in youth is wasted, and teeming crowds were expected for the next several months of the World’s Fair.  I’d been taking baby steps at denying the world but finally seized control, mistakenly thinking the cabbie life would help with being prone to dark hours.  It did, at least initially.  I’m not a con man, humbug, double dealer, trickster, or rip-off artist, in case clarification is necessary.  The customer desires a service.  I provide it.  The customer pays for the service.  Plenty of work to go around.  As the society page Uptowners might say, I’ve made my debut in society.  Tips appreciated.