Errata Read online

  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 des
perate 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.

  ERRATA

  One of my first thoughts when stepping away from the teaching job was that of pleasure at no more daily shaving. My 5 o’clock shadow arrives by noon and shaving becomes an unfortunate exercise in scraping sensitive skin. Also, I have an approximately ten year age differential from how old I look when clean shaven as compared to with a couple days of stubble. The idea of growing a beard seemed refreshing and possibly defining. Would these whiskers provide a crisp new visual persona that I‘d been missing out on? I was hoping to look like a thawed stoic, a charismatic poet in the sepia glow of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph, or a wise Eastern Orthodox monk, only with scanner chatter to break the self-imposed solitude instead of monksong. Instead I resembled ridiculous. No hint of elegance. Only monastic disorder. The impression on fares was highly unfavorable. Glances lead to starts, starts to stares, and stares to discreet astonishment of amusement or pity. Women clutched their purses tighter than usual. No less than the Anabaptists would’ve rejected me. I have a face that calls out for a covering of facial hair, only not too much. So now I shave twice a week, enough for an almost continual layer of stubble, which represents me most suitably. It makes one wonder, though, about those born out-of-time because of looking beastly with full-grown facial hair while living during a whiskery period like the mid-1800’s, or vice versa those who appear pinched, maybe weak-chinned, or worse when clean-shaven, living during the peach-cheeked days of the mid 1900’s. How many fates must’ve been determined, since appearance counts for miles, disfavoring those who didn’t look quite right, much less outright ugly by sporting the facial fashion of the day, how many lovers lost, how many job promotions denied? In a critical moment, it counts.

  Many men have many minds, so shouldn’t many men also be permitted an assorted masquerade ability to wear several varieties of facial hair or none? The first clause of the preceding sentence references a chapter title from The Confidence Man by Herman Melville, which is appropriate because his writing wasn’t always appreciated throughout his lifetime, but his beard certainly was and is, what with the iconic photographs of the bearded Melville remaining his prevailing visual impression. He knew the power of sporting one’s own Spanish moss during an exceptionally hairy era, using over two dozen different words or phrases of beard description in the novel White Jacket, published when he was barely into his 30’s and his writing career was already waning, requiring him to pursue another line of work.

  All of this reminds me of a fellow student from my university days, when I lived in a dormitory as a freshman. The self-dubbed Ulysses, since he was apparently bored with being known as the hardly-

  comparable Karl Fuchs, sought to distinguish himself from the others at the small religiously-affiliated college, and like a somersaulter amidst a pack of proper to-and-from walkers, he relished a habit of riding shock-value with quirks like shaving half-and-half so that one side of his face was clean-shaven and the other was a frontier of curls. It was no surprise to hear Ulysses dubbing cassettes at double-speed with the speakers blasting down the hallway, while he sat in his room calmly studying, ears covered with headphones not plugged in. Ulysses, literally 1 in 1,000, was actively caught in between and his eccentricities brashly displayed what most of us covertly keep under wraps. The struggle. The stretching of oneself in shrunken places.

  Day 7

  My current relationship with books is a complicated one of necessity, limitation, and cross-use. I value the written word a great deal, however I have neither the funds nor enough room in my semi-

  fastidious little space to support dual collecting. So (and if I’m to be tried for any crime, let it be this one), chancing a multiplicity of curses, I make the rounds to each of the downtown bookshops and the public library, discreetly slipping out with no more than two new companions at a time, no location hit more than once every two months, hardcovers when possible for their functionality, titles depending on the chance of which unobserved sections lessen the risk of being caught (this has helped to satisfy my obsessive desire to accumulate a little knowledge about everything, slightly expanding my horizons beyond only reading fiction, as I’m prone to do, seeking the escape into a well-told story and having it stir my imagination, as simple, timeless, and naturally necessary as a thirst for water). One might think this enterprise would cause a build-up of stacks over time except for the sake of my landlord’s neglect. The apartment floor used to sag in several spots where the foot and a half tall brick piers that elevate the house have lost a significant amount of strength over the years as the mortar has worn away and the rivermud bricks crumbled. My solution was books as bricks. They have a limited outdoor life, of course, but the baker’s dozen of books each month find a suitable pragmatic purpose after they’ve served the literary one. Many writers would surely be offended by this unintended use of their work, but I like to think that those I most cherish would instead be inordinately delighted to play a role in holding up a house, that they might actually subordinate their awards and accolades to being part of a rotating keystone of literature.

  I know Josef Vachal would understand. Vachal, a Czech who lived through three-quarters of the 20th century, was an all-around renaissance book man. He wrote, illustrated, and bound volumes that portrayed the heights and depths of the soul and the flesh, conveying a fiercely individualistic world view. When the former Czechoslovakia became a dictatorship, Vachal, arguably a visionary on the level of William Blake, refused to use his art for the capacity of the state, so he was put to the street, where he survived by wearing multiple layers of clothing and drinking melted snow. At any point he could’ve returned to a strain of his former lifestyle, but his resolve was firm, though he eventually retreated to a small town in the Eastern part of the country. I suspect that if, by necessity, he needed to burn books to keep from freezing to death, Vachal did, without hesitation, in the same way he moved from a poetic existence to one of raw pragmatism (it’s an unequal comparison, but raw pragmatism is what also leads me to write this notebook). Most of us have the liberty to live without this type of bleak distinction, thankfully, and I pay Vachal tribute in a simple ongoing way, with a Vachal Miniature Museum, which is my only precious possession. Like many artists, he designed small ex-libris for benefactors and friends, book plate prints of only a few square inches to be pasted into a bibliophile’s library, either on the front endpaper adhered to the cover board or the free endpaper across on the recto side. The ex-libris are also designed as limited edition morsels of art, often numbered up to no more than a few hundred. Vachal, by any estimation, created a fe
w thousand ex-libris and wood cuts over the years, mostly while centered in Prague during the time between the wars. The Czechs continue to pursue book arts with an imaginative flourish, and Vachal’s work remains legendary in his home country where artists created in code as a matter of course to slip content past censors.