West Coast Hearts by Thomas A. Morgan

Mountains in October

And then it was October. It begins to cool down. Wind shifts off the ocean and drapes the southland mornings in fog that burns off before noon. The lovely smell of the rotting leaves; the coldstone feel of the canyon mornings.

I've hiked Mt. Wilson on mornings like these. You get up past first water and the trail clears out. You curl around the bend and forge upward and soon you're in the silence of the California wilderness--if this part of California can still be considered wild. You stop on the trail and listen. Not even a jet overhead. Far below, the valley floor but you're deep in the canyon at that point and above the smog levels, and so can't see it.

Up here is where I would go to clear my thoughts, where I could hear nothing but my own mind reading along whatever ideas I had. When I was writing Dryline Rhapsody, I would take to the trail to dislodge all the clatter that existed below. The air is cool and clean; the smells decidedly non-Foothill Blvd.

The first time I took to the trail was actually on a rainy spring afternoon. Someone (a co-worker) had mentioned the place and vaguely told me how to get there. It raining like all get-out and the shoes I had one were casual weekender things, not trail boots, but I started up the trail nevertheless. I didn't get too far before I realized that the trail was more a stream and that I ought to make my way back when the weather clears and I have better shoes. The following weekend I did just that, and so began my trail-watch.

It's quite literary to hike. Many of us sad city folks and suburbanites might forget what it's like to see the woods in the autumn or to follow a springtime brook. I had. (I'm originally from New Hampshire where it was occasionally more than wild) But having found this outlet, I could now converse and organize whatever thoughts I had, and at the time it was more or less geared toward Dryline Rhapsody, my novel project about post-postmodern California.

Then there's West Coast Hearts. It has a life of its own and I admit I haven't really extended myself to it that much; been marketing the other two manuscripts, one of which, North of Here, has been submitted to a competition recently.

All mountains take time; all writing takes time. But I'm glad I've given over the time to it, and someday you'll thank me. Someday you'll thank the mountain, too.

September Stages

Rain returned to Southern California--significant rain, which we haven't seen down in here more than six months. Personally, I'm thrilled. To me, it means change.

September is always a good month to return to an old book and consider that winter is coming. The light changes on the West Coast. You begin to slow down. And while the "winter" in the Southland is hardly like anywhere else, it is nevertheless four months of cool dark nights and orange-bright days.

But today, rain--for a while, at least. I'll take that. In this transitional period any kind of change is good.

West Coast Hearts is actually a project about change. I'm removing the melodrama from the project and have relocated it to a few destructive scenes, which means to me it could be translated to a theater project. Indeed, I've begun in earnest working on a few plays and the more I thought about this particular project the more I realized it belonged on the stage.

But I digress. All theater begins after an event. And what you see is a reaction to said event. Since West Cost Hearts was essentially dealing with infidelities, the narrative would be strong enough to play out on the stage and certainly more realized. It also allows for a compact period of time--and immediacy to the subject.

Now all I have to do is write the damn thing. Dryline Rhapsody took nine months to complete. This project has been kicking around in my head for quite a while (probably since I moved down here to Orange County). The upshot is that I have an agent waiting in the wings for this stuff. Let him wait.

Mountain Lake Scenario

The other day I commented on my other blog about a recent article which suggested that nearly a a quarter of Americans don't really read books. At first I might've been disturbed by this, even totally discouraged. But if nothing else it throws fuel on my own personal fire, and that fire is designed to change book publishing.

Years ago I tried to write this super high concept book about something or other (it was sci-fi) and I got bored with it very quickly. I concluded that I sometimes only like to read sci-fi and that I would never really be a sci-fi writer. I tried my hand at horror but it does limit creativity so I bailed on it. I never tried to write fantasy, and must admit that I'm a big fan of that kind of storytelling.

My heroes have never really walked that line, not really. Sure, there are Gothic elements in some of my favorite writers' cache (Faulkner, Lawrence), maybe even a ghost or two (Shakespeare, Le Fanu) but for the most part the stories I write are more along the lines of the dark places that we stumble upon during the day.

Granted, it's hard to find that sort of darkness in a place so awash with light as California, I am convinced that it's here because, quite frankly, there are far too many people for this place not to have an underlying darkness to it.

Which makes me think of the rain that'll fall this coming winter on some of the mountain towns not far from the manicured places in the Southland. Out there, when the light fails and the slick roads are illumined by wet. Maybe a car is pulled off to the side of the road. The driver, a man in his late 30s, looks out across the San Gabriel Mountain range down toward a warmly-lighted cabin next to the lake; the light from the boathouse dock cuts through the downpour and reflects off the rough, windswept water. He sits forward as a shadow passes across the auburn drape--a lean, familiar silhouette.

Then the light goes out. A moment later the door swings open and a man and woman exit toward the parked car that glows like snow in the afterglow of the mountains. They're close like lovers. It's at this moment that he thinks about the handgun on the seat next to him...

And so, the story returns to West Coast Hearts. It's been simmering for quite some time, but that's the nature of writing: it never seems to be there when you need it to be, rather it's there when it needs to be.

Ranchos And Meadowlarks

The old scratchy black-and-white film they'd show in November at my school when I was a kid depicted settlers in their roughhewn cabin that is dwarfed by the ancient (presumably) New England forest--a forest of mysteries in which they've sacrificed everything to live. I go back to those forests to find mystery again in my life and each time I'm amazed at how shady and dark those woods are.

Old woods. The stuff that made Robert Frost's writing so decidedly New England (he was actually from California but, as a poet and writer, wished to be forever associated with the Northeast): light and dark contrasts, mists and fog, changing seasons, old people with old ways living in a time before all of this. His books gather dust on shelves the world over. All poets' works do.

Invariably, I would find my way up into the fields that surrounded our property in New Hampshire to channel the freedom that marked their words. The meadow, as we called it, was large and windswept. It had a distance and depth to it. It wasn't flat or compromising. No, this was a real Yankee field to be hayed and hayed again.

I reflect on the feeling of reaching the top of the meadow to find the surrounding mountaintops. They were always there. Most of the time there'd be that insect hum of summer tempered by the call of the meadowlark, or the cold stillness of winter or the rain-heavy springtime fragrance of a gray afternoon, or the amazing foliage, which is beyond description. I don't think I've really known peace since. And even if it didn't happen the way I remembered it, I can go back to see a semblance of what it was like: stony, timeless, classically New England.

I put Dryline Rhapsody's main character, Dean Oakland, in the lovely New Hampshire summer because he needed to get his monologue out of California. I think the remoteness, the less-than-immediateness of the place saves, really. Otherwise, I'm sure he would've driven off a cliff somewhere in the San Gabriels.

We can't go home again. I don't really try anymore. There's too much work to be done on the West Coast, too many commentaries and stories.

West Coast Hearts, therefore, is a work in progress. It will be something someday. It will be dark because there are shades and shadows here. It will be remote because beyond the edges of the cities out here there are places people find themselves--often thinking that they're beyond consequence, which, of course, is the cornerstone of the California mind.

The Road So Far

Conversations I've had with other folks who're pursuing this whole "writing thing" invariably takes us down the whole why'd I get into this in the first place argument--a series of tete-a-tete lamentations in which the two (or three, or four) writers at once declare, albeit shakily, that perhaps it was a mistake to follow this dream only to conclude that they're glad they did because, as I often say, being a writer means you're not only actively participating in the human race but observing it as well.

That's often a tough sell for some types. I mean, if your goal is to make money, then work in a bank. You'll be surrounded by it all day. But if your goal is to somehow enrich your life and the lives of those around you--if your goal is to relieve people of the day-to-day crap that brings people to despair--choose something else that doesn't involved screwing people out of money!

I once knew someone who was perfectly content just to travel the world to places farflung and remote, and not record it in any way (except, of course, in pictures). I asked, "Well, you should write about it," and she goes, "What for?" Exactly. What for. For writers, we think in terms of dramatic situations. We think in terms of the world as a backdrop to what happens next (be it good or bad). For me personally if I was witness to a beautiful rustic scene, my first instinct would be to, say, imagine a character emerging from the brush, musket in hand, a stranger in a strange land. And then the story in my mind begins to play; I begin to think of what happens next.

But not everyone's a writer. It's a lifelong training session that begins with realization of how a writer did something in your favorite book, and you saying, I can do that. My writer's road started sometime in the early mid-80s, probably around the time I'd read Hemingway or Fitzgerald; it was either Gatsby or Sun Also Rises--I can't remember which. But there it was: the moment wherein I said, I can do that.

Novel writing--any kind of writing, really--is a wonderful, tiring, exploratory experience. It's something I'll never stop doing because it affords such a lovely glimpse into the way I see things on this road so far. I can't even imagine not writing, actually. And when you've completed a couple of manuscripts and have finally landed that agent (which I have), part of the battle is over and you can be free to work on your gift; now I'm closer to publishing Dryline Rhapsody and North of Here; now I can put my energy behind this blog's title piece, West Coast Hearts.

And that's the road so far. Dylan said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Gotta keep on keein' on," and ain't that the goddamn truth?

Broken Camelots

Finished reading Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf the other morning at around 4 am. I had read it before years ago but this published version of it was for the 2005 Broadway revival. Someone commented that it's about marital disconnect but that's putting it lightly. It's about relationships, plain and simple. It's a wonderful snapshot of America in the 60s, behind closed doors, away from the trappings of what we idealize as their lives then. Indeed, coupled with Richard Yates' masterful Revolutionary Road, which has become one of my all-time favorite novels, this play is an absolute must-read for the post-postmodern human race.

And, of course, the filmed version, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, directed by Mike Nichols, from a script by Ernest Lehman, is just explosive. I mean, really: who else could pull off George and Martha?!

I'll re-read the play and probably see the movie again, now that I'm a little older. When I first read it and saw the movie I don't think I was quite ready to understand just what the hell is going on. But if you're a serious writer, you do owe it to yourself to read it.

I'm not sure Dryline Rhapsody could meet the destructiveness of the Albee's play. However, West Coast Hearts might. And now having survived this reading, I wonder if I'm ready to re-begin this novel's draft?

I believe in an honest re-birth of literature. So much of what we see and read is crap. Where's the heart of the story, the heart of the matter? Goddamn it, can I carry that weight?

Bourgeois, Am I...?

So there we were sitting on the plane, ready to head back to the West Coast from NY when all in a sudden they announce that we ain't going nowhere, that all planes are grounded on account of the storm systems ravaging the Midwest, and those which were headed to wreck the East Coast.

So taxied out to the run way, and waited.

And waited...

And waited.

The plane would finally take off six hours later. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I'm here to talk about is the nouveau-rich bitch who was apparently knocked up by some rock & roll drummer and who had to get back to L.A. by six the next morning or the world would end, or something like that.

I don't know whether she was really a bitch per se; in the classical sense, I suppose she's right up there with Atia of the Julii (who is characterized wonderfully by Polly Walker in Rome). Nevertheless, there we all were in the same grounded plane, enduring her absolutely wailing child, and all this woman could do is complain to the attendants that she had to get off the plane and find another way to California, that she was willing to pay $10,000 to get to California, but what would she do about $30,000 worth of jewelry in her luggage?

What kind of jackass really needs to make a spectacle of herself as such? I mean, really, isn't that a wonderful way to get jumped in a parking lot?! F*ckin' idiot!

And her kid--a two-year-old, I guess--just wouldn't stop screaming. I remember her saying dismissively to it (I'm not sure whether it was a boy or girl) that, "I know you're hungry but [the attendants] don't care if you're starving."

Things cooled down when we finally did get airborne but not before a few very tense exchanges with other passengers--one of which was accompanied by a furious applause.

Well, we made it back to Burbank by 2:00 am. I got home more than an hour and a half later. And the rock drummer's skanky wife? She faded into the SoCal night like a bad nightmare. Just the same, I'm reminded that life out on the Coast continues to amaze and that I'll forever find the right kind of inspiration for this ongoing and slightly belabored writing project known as West Coast Hearts.

Peace.

T.A.M.

Furies & Removals

I guess we all have to take a break from Faulkner. He requires a lot from us. But when we return, what a land of plenty we're given access to.

Of course, it's not always this way. Back when I first read The Sound and The Fury, I was an 18-year-old idiot. I didn't know what the hell was going on. It was a book from another era and the verbiage and concerns--let alone structure--made little or no sense. And yet high school teachers and college professors alike, by hook or by crook, force that stuff onto would-be literary types like myself.

It's not until the second part of Fury that you begin to understand what the hell is going on. And then I suppose you appreciate the tragedy. Frankly, if you're going to read Faulkner, start with As I Lay Dying or Light In August then make your way over to Fury. My personal favorites are If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms) and Sanctuary. Wonderful stuff.

But I digress. I was talking about self-discovery, which is what I've recently sought and have gotten (albeit softly) from reading parts of his short story collection, Go Down, Moses. The most impacting story from this book is "The Bear", which, perhaps, requires a few readings to get; I still haven't gotten it. But "Delta Autumn" is a wonderful and airy snapshot of a tale that includes hunters, tragic Southerners, and Faulkner's wonderful descriptive narratives.

Yes, and in small doses, I visit Faulkner in my manuscripts Dryline Rhapsody and North of Here. These are two very different writing projects; whereas Dryline is more of a personal journey, the latter is more plot-oriented, and akin to James M. Cain and perhaps even David Lynch. Either way, other writers tend to open one's eyes, and Faulkner et al certainly paved the way for me to see how a story can be told.

Indeed, all writers aspire to be as great as William Faulkner. All writers at some point fashion a story or two in the same familial disparaging way. Some of us get it; others never will. If he is in fact our Shakespeare (which he could very well be), then we are made even more human by his grasp of humanness and humility.

Surfing the Landslides

I've talked at length, though maybe not so much here, about places that are not designed for tragedy. What comes to mind, of course, are these rapidly produced housing tracts that are skillfully woven into the Orange County landscape. And while tragedy is hardly exclusive, I wonder sometimes if that's ever in the design when they build these things?

No amount of money is going to stave off an accident; the river is going to breech the levee if it can, the wildfire is going to follow the wind, the landslide is going to bring the mountain down. Years ago when half of Malibu was on fire, there was a sense of rejoicing by people who weren't from California; maybe Malibu wasn't a myth after all; maybe Californians are human.

So what about these newer communities that look out over the once orange-groved land?

I drove up into these places that gather at the base of Saddleback Mountain just to have that cottony sense of security. And truly it's there. There's nothing that could possibly happen to these people. They've paid serious money to remove themselves from the coast and from the hot inland madness that starts somewhere around Tustin and continues infinitely until the grip of Los Angeles is loosed.

What calls to mind is screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan's quote that appeared in a recent New Yorker issue:

“Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.”

That is so amazingly spot-on. Though I can't say with confidence that ambition built those mansions on the hill, I can say that for at least a short while we're guaranteed at least a thousand sunsets all of us, so it's in our best interest to make the most out of them.

This, in essence, is what West Coast Hearts is about: ambition, greed, lust, revenge--all of it wrapped around an amazingly beautiful sunset. I haven't worked on it nearly enough lately but truly I'm beginning to see the story take shape. Having now lived down here for more than a year, I can say the story is beginning to find me, just as Dryline Rhapsody did.

I'm surfing the landslides, man.

A Witness to Something

I was a witness to a memory, once. Smoky, cloudfilled afternoons that I remember from earlier distractions; we seemed to move mainly from the cold parked Subaru to the house, and back. And then, as often would happen, the lightning-crisp nights, the cold late spring rain, the ozone fragrance of the air. Rain drummed the ceiling all night long, and when the smoky morning faded into flat daylight it was time to venture forth into the New England day.

A lot of drunkards about. There was a fire in the town, distantly. It was on an old swamp road between two logging trails that led past an ancient orchard where we slowed to a lilt at a rot-walled two story house with a propane tank beside. Some or other lines from some sad Yankee poet painted the scene in my mind. As we (me and Devin and Steve) passed in drunken reverie, a woman dressed in white ragtime night things dashed into the sideyard, followed at once by a laughing, crazed, long-haired man who was nearly naked save for his jeans. They laughed and chased the circumference of the apple tree before departing indoors like elevated woodnymphs. We fell silent and amazed, and through our cigarettes laughed and imagined if that was where we were headed someday.

The postcard collection I had spoke of many things from the last century, not the least of which was someone named Martha who broke her arm (it was now in a splint) but she was all too thankful for the books whomever had sent; some poetry, something Thoreaulike, something else far-off and lovely. I wonder sometimes if later in her life (she lived in the early 20th Century) she ever found her lover at her door like she may have imagined romance to be; I wonder if all elder postcards are a witness to something.