The Devil's Daybook: Origins

If he hits one more pothole like that one, I thought but did not say, there won’t be enough left of CloudBoy’s ashes to scatter.

I know that people consider the deserts of the American Southwest to be among the most beautiful vistas in the world and, I admit, even I, the urbanist of urbanites, can take some solace in open space on occasion.

But Jesusmaryandjoseph, couldn’t they figure out a way to keep the roads paved? This was the interstate, after all.

Luke was doing the best he could. And I loved Luke. The hair long and golden back then, the way the skin of his gold-dusted arm, palest of the pale in its natural urban state, warmed in the sun from the slightest shade of pink through a buff orange and then to a nice even brown, like bread from a mother’s oven. Ummm—Umm. Good enough to eat.

Which I did. Regularly.

We were lovers then. Lovers on a mission from someone else’s God.


+++

“That’s not the way you want to start this,” Carla said.

“Why not?”

“Don’t give me that naïve shit,” she said and then she grunted as she hauled her number one soup pot out of the industrial sized sink I had gotten her last year. She was grateful when I found her the sink, even if it took us two months to find a guest who could install it.

“Make yourself useful,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth I was heading to the rack of dishtowels drying in the corner by the stairs.

I love Carla.

“You don’t want to start your book by rubbing everyone’s nose in the messiness of your sex,” she said. “And what’s this ‘I loved Luke back then’ stuff? He’s not dead and gone. He’s just in Italy for the semester. You writing a historical novel or something?”

The two of us toweled the pot dry and Carla stashed it away.

“First of all, young lady,” I said, “who are you to tell me what I want to do, please?”

Luke’s cornflower blue eyes stared back at me from under her—how do they put it in novels?—under her knitted brow.”

“Get us some coffee, old man” she said. I was four years her senior. “We’ve got about an hour before the next round arrives.”

I walked across the scrubbed gray linoleum of the dining room to the hundred-cup perpetually grumbling coffee machine and filled two chipped ceramic mugs of indeterminate color and brought them to the near end of the closest of the long tables that filled the considerable room. If we had to, we could feed seventy-five down here in the basement.

“Here’s the thing,” she said as she sat down across from me. “Do you, or do you not, want people to read your book? I mean,” she cut me off with the wave of a hand before I could speak, “real people, not just our kind.”

“Are we not real?”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “You have a story, we have a story here that needs to be told. Jonah can’t do it, and so you volunteered.

“As you know, I didn’t exactly volunteer.”

“Well, whatever it is you are going to write, if you want people to listen, you shouldn’t repel the reader on the first page.”

“Why not?” I objected. “What planet do you live on, lady? Shock and revulsion sell.”

“In your case—in our case—it also misrepresents.”

She took a long draft of the lukewarm coffee and I knew she was missing a cigarette, two years after she gave them up.

“You could fill this room with people who think I’m revolting,” I said. “In under an hour. Easily.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Jason, even at your worst you’re not one person, one kind of person. There are all kinds of folks in there.” She pointed to my head with a calloused finger. “But pornographer is not one of them. Let them out, the real ones. On the page. Now.”

She was right. Carla is always right.

We sat in . . . I almost said “silence” but that would be an untruth. Even in the basement we could hear the traffic on the highway up the valley past the university to the Land of the Very Rich and the Very Unhappy.

“You need to talk to Jonah,” she said as she got up.

I was grumbling as I got up, but Carla was right.


++++++++++++++


I found Jonah, as expected, on the veranda of the faculty club, an open space of brick-red walls and a broad slate floor with the best view in town; from this point on the campus, one looked out over the whole of the valley and across the river to the city, hazy in the distance with the smog of late spring and early summer. Up here the air was still fresh and the noise of traffic could be confused, with only a little effort, with the passing of a breeze through the birch and maple woods of the lower campus. The song I could hear faintly in the distance—must have come from a radio in the kitchen—had it right: Air Supply was droning on, yet again, referring to a very different context about “afternoon delight.”

He was sitting with Marian, the two of them seemingly lost in thought after a good lunch as they gazed out at the view. I startled them, though their pleasure at seeing me, I hasten to add, was genuine.

“Bless me father,” I said once I had situated myself at the table for my share of the panorama below. “I need help.”

“Not today’s headlines,” he said and took a long pull from his water glass. “This
would be about the book.”

“It would be indeed,” I said.

“You don’t know how to start,” he said. “Happens to me every time.”

“Au contraire. I know how to start,” I said. “But Carla won’t let me.”

“Not the sex, Jason,” Marian said. “Don’t start with the sex.”

“Carla and Marian won’t let me.”

Marian called herself “just a housewife” who never went to college because early on she met a rich husband, but she was sharp all right.

A crow flew past us, out beyond the terrace. May you be the Holy Spirit in drag, come down from above to enlighten us all.

“You priests are prejudiced against—“ I began, but Jonah cut me off.

“Prejudiced against sex?” he said. “Don’t go there. That’s—“

I graciously maintained the higher ground here, mouth shut, as a young waiter, serious looking in horn rimmed glasses, with nice wide shoulders and a crisp lilt to his step, brought me my own tall glass of ice water. As a rule I don’t care for polyester, but his tight brown pants . . . .

“Jason!” Marian shouted at me as the waiter hustled off.

“Hey, he’s probably a graduate student,” I said.

“You are thoroughly shameless,” she said and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.

The wind lifted Marian’s smoke out into the wide space before us, rustling the trees below. I am the city incarnate, but I had come to appreciate the sound of the wind in the leaves. Especially on a warm night with the windows open, lying in the arms of—

“How exactly do you write a book, Padre,” Marian asked Jonah.

“Dull as it sounds, you just start,” he said. “The prospect may be wearying, but eventually you write yourself into it.”

He lit a cigarette and his smoke joined Marian’s, wafting out into the great beyond.

“Mostly, it depends on what you’re writing,” Jonah said. “A book about the origins of Fourth Street, that was Carla’s idea, not yours, right?

I nodded. “I mean, I’m open to doing it,” I said. “I said I would, and it needs to be done.”

“And you might be the one to do it. But I’m not sure that’s how you should begin. Not,” he said, “if the purpose is to get your mind off your troubles.”

In the corner of my eye I could see Bubble Butt at the other end of the terrace, escorting my old linguistics teacher and his equally elderly wife to a table.

“Maybe what you should do is start with a daybook,” Jonah said.

“What’s a daybook?” Marian asked.

“It’s hard to say. That’s why it’s a great way to start,” Jonah said. “It’s a place you can put down anything.”

“Not like a diary, right?” I said. “All full of feelings and sh—stuff. If there’s one thing I don’t want to do to get my mind off things is to hash and rehash them out in a diary.”

“No, that’s not what a daybook is,” Jonah said. “Think of it as a mental scrapbook, a place where you jot down your observations of all aspects of your life—conversations you have with people, ideas that occur to you and you don’t want to forget, books you read, movies you see.”

He put out his cigarette in the glass ash tray on the table.

“Anything that interests you is grist for that mill,” he said, and he made to leave, probably for a class. “And if after a while you turn it into an account of the founding of the house, all the better.”

“My take on theology?” I asked, and Jonah nodded.

“And the sex?” I continued. “I could put in the sex?”

Jonah shared a glance with Marian.

“In your daybook, just tell the truth. If that involves theology or sexuality, or even a theology of sexuality, put it down,” he said. “But my suggestion would be to do it in a way that will help a reader, Marian here for instance, to understand what you are talking about.”

“Padre,” Marian said, “you’re telling Jason to--.”

“To teach you about sex, yes,” he said. “And theology.”

“This won’t be very orthodox, you know,” I said, and he chuckled.

“I said you should tell the truth, right?”

The truth was settling in for Marian.

“Oh, dear God,” she muttered, and reflexively reached for her cigarettes.

“I’ll take care of the check on the way out,” Jonah said. “Why don’t you two sit here a bit longer and enjoy the view?”

“For sure,” I said, looking for the waiter.

“Jason!” Marian squawked with mock displeasure.

“A daybook,” I said to her.

“The daybook from hell,” she said.

Yeah. I can do that.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and on the fear of the bad.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” July 15, 1838.