The Next One

Tags

a plot for pridemore, author, mercer university press, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

About five months ago, I completed the manuscript for my second novel. There will be a few rounds of editing ahead, but I’m confident that the stack of 324 pages in my downstairs office reads cleanly and is largely free of embarrassing typographical errors.

I do not want to give away too much about the new novel until I have more clarity on how and when it will be published. Let’s just say that the book draws from my personal experience of being part of a weekend rock band with a few of my middle-aged buddies. If you enjoyed the wry humor of my first novel, A Plot for Pridemore, I think you will appreciate the new book. Even though the characters and subject matter are quite different, the style of storytelling is very much the same.

It’s been two years since Pridemore came out, and my original goal was to complete a second novel by January 2015. That proved to be a bit ambitious, as much of my writing time is relegated to late nights after we have put our child to bed. I finished the initial draft last fall, put it through a couple of rounds of edits, then shared it with a handful of readers who provided me with some excellent advice on the story’s tone and structure. After implementing many of their ideas, I reviewed the manuscript one final time earlier this year.

I’m excited about the new novel, and a little bit proud of myself for completing it, albeit a little later than planned. I believe the new work is a topical, engaging, uniquely American story. Hopefully, it is a forward step in my life as a fiction writer, which I would love to turn into a full-time endeavor one of these days.

I will be sure to update you as soon as I have any additional news to share. In the meantime, be sure to check out A Plot for Pridemore if you haven’t already. You can find it here, along with many other fine works on the Mercer University Press website.

Blue Light Special

Tags

1980s, georgia, growing up, lagrange, midnight oil, u2

Kids who grow up in the city don’t know how good they have it.

Provided you have transportation and a little disposable income, you can choose a different activity for every single day of the year if you live in a large metropolitan area. In the city, there are museums, aquariums, zoos, amusement parks, professional sports, shopping centers and even dinosaur-themed restaurants from which to choose. In the city, there is no excuse to ever be bored, even though my son might sometimes disagree with me.

For kids who live in smaller towns, it’s different. Sometimes you have to make your own fun. Sometimes, that fun may be ill-advised.

I was luckier than most. I grew up in a mid-sized town called LaGrange that had a four-year college, a large recreational lake, golf courses, tennis courts and about 10 months of good weather each year. When I was in high school in the late 1980s, they opened up a six-screen cinema in my town, which was a social and cultural game-changer for me and my peers. I saw my first R-rated movie in that theater (Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close), even though my friends and I were under-aged. The new Cineplex brought a little bit of big-city daring and decadence to the town of LaGrange, Georgia.

Still, it could get boring at times. We had to make our own fun. My friend Jason and I swore off drinking for our high school careers, and we didn’t quite have enough nerve to swing though the school parking, where a lot of our classmates hung out on Friday and Saturday nights. Some evenings, we just drove around town in Jason’s Volkswagen Jetta, blasting U2 on the tape deck and somehow hoping that Bono’s words would inspire us to drive into the high school parking lot and talk to the cool kids.

One night, just to try something different, we grabbed a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, and a large, blue plastic cup from Jason’s house. Our hope was that, by taping the cup over the flashlight, and turning the light off and on rapidly, we could simulate the kind of pulsing blue light that police officers mounted on the dashboards of their patrol cars. To test our experiment, I stood on the side of the street and watched Jason whiz by in the Jetta a few times, his right arm holding the flashlight over the dash and turning it on and off just as fast as he could. Sure enough, it looked a lot like a police light.

When you are a pair of bored 18-year-olds who suddenly have invented your own police light, your next move is obvious. We hit the road on a warm Saturday night, patrolling the unlit rural routes that wound around and across West Point Lake. At about 10 o’clock that night, we pulled behind a red Chevrolet pick-up that was going about 10 miles above the speed limit. Jason turned the volume down on the Midnight Oil album we’d been listening to. Riding shotgun, I turned on the blue light and held it to the windshield, my thumb doing double-time over the switch to create the perfect effect. I might have even been whistling siren noises at the time.

After a quarter mile or so, the truck slowed and stopped on the gravel shoulder. Jason and I stared at each other in amazement. Did we just pull this guy over? What do we do now?

Jason gave it half a second of thought, then stomped the accelerator. The red pick-up was a blur as we sped by. Jason did not slow down until we entered the city limits. Along the way, I looked nervously in the side-view mirror, expecting to see the Chevy’s headlights cresting the hill behind us, its driver furious at being snookered by a pair of skinny, wanna-be cops in a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta.

Fortunately, we got away. Jason and I took the blue light out on the road a couple more times that summer, but we made only half-hearted attempts at enforcing the county’s traffic code. My friend and I were just a few weeks away from going to college in different parts of the country. Neither of us wanted any trouble when we were so close to our first tastes of freedom.

I sometimes think about that summer and how we might have been charged with a felony if we’d been caught using a flashlight and a plastic cup to transform Jason’s Jetta into a Georgia patrol car. If that happened today, of course, we’d be on the six o’clock news, and all over social media. Our lives would be ruined, at least for a while.

That’s why I feel for the kids growing up in the smaller towns, and maybe even the kids in the cities, too. The tolerance level for teen-aged mistakes is a lot lower these days, and the amount of public shaming is at an all-time high. One act of stupidity, and a kid could be in serious trouble. And who hasn’t done something stupid when they’re young and bored and aching for a little bit of adventure, like pretending to be a patrol officer for a night?

Ali, The Poet

Tags

1960s, boxing, muhammad ali, peyton manning, poetry, sports, the greatest, tom brady, writing

I’m not old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was in his fighting prime, but I’ve always enjoyed watching old film clips and documentaries about him in those days. I especially love the poems he would write and share with the press before big fights. In addition to being the greatest boxer in the world, he was a genius with words and phrases. Ali coined “Rumble in the Jungle,” and “Thrilla In Manila,” the phrases we use to recall two of his most pivotal bouts. Grantland Rice would have been hard-pressed to come up with better catch-phrases than those.

Ali wrote the following poem, “I am the Greatest,” when his name was still Cassius Clay. He was 21 at the time. National Public Radio featured the original audio recording of the poem earlier this week.

Do you know any 21-year-olds who have the self-assurance to read a piece of verse they wrote to a large gathering of strangers? Do they also possess the skill to make the piece boastful, but humorous and playful at the same time? And do they have the charisma to read a poem called “I am the Greatest” without coming across as an arrogant jackass? Finally, how many 21-year-olds do you know who could back up that performance by actually being the greatest at what they do?

It has been written many times that Ali was a one-of-a-kind, and that is true for many reasons. For me, his charisma stands out as something totally unique in the dull, calculated, humorless world of sports. Can you imagine Tom Brady or Peyton Manning sharing poems they wrote before an upcoming Super Bowl?

Here’s the poem. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y,
of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speed-y.
The fistic world was dull and weary,
But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color and someone with dash,
Brought fight fans a-runnin’ with cash.
This brash young boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his des-tin-y.
This kid fights great; he’s got speed and endurance,
But if you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.
This kid’s got a left; this kid’s got a right,
If he hit you once, you’re asleep for the night.
And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten,
You’ll pray that you won’t have to fight me again.
For I am the man this poem’s about,
The next champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
This I predict and I know the score,
I’ll be champ of the world in ’64.
When I say three, they’ll go in the third.

So don’t bet against me, I’m a man of my word.
He is the greatest! Yes!
I am the man this poem’s about,
I’ll be champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment,
I’ll hit him so hard; he’ll wonder where October and November went.
When I say two, there’s never a third,
Standin’ against me is completely absurd.
When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse,
Don’t ask how; put your money where your mouse is!
I AM THE GREATEST!”

My Piano and Me

Tags

author, billy joel, humor, music, piano, piano man, Stephen Roth, yamaha

One of my unrealized dreams in life is to learn how to play the piano really well. As a kid, I took piano lessons from the 3rd through 8th grade, but I didn’t enjoy it. I never really learned how to read music, and I played most songs by ear.

As I grew older, I began to think about how gratifying it would be to just sit down at a piano and play whatever sheet music was in front of me. Shortly after we married, my wife and I bought a cherry wood upright Yamaha that we put in our front living room. For a few years, I would plop down at the piano and play the 10 or so songs I knew by heart, and work my way through a few new ones. I fantasized about having friends over for dinner and leading late-night singalongs from my Yamaha, playing the hits I knew from the Beatles, Joe Cocker, Aretha Franklin, Coldplay, Billy Joel and Elton John.

This never came to pass. Not quite, anyway. One Saturday, my friend Brad and I had plans to drive up to the College World Series in Omaha. We were going to meet very early in the morning at the home of a mutual acquaintance I didn’t know very well. When I arrived at the house, the man and his wife invited me in, and we chatted while waiting for my friend to show up. I admired the upright piano they had in their living room.

“We just got it,” the man said. “Neither of us knows how to play, though.”

“Brad told me you play,” his wife said sweetly. “Would you play a song for us? We’d love to hear how our piano sounds.”

They looked at me, smiling expectantly. I nodded and slowly made my way to the piano bench. It was about 6 o’clock in the morning.

I played a few chords from “Piano Man,” which is one of the easiest tunes I know. I began singing, because the song sounds sparse without the familiar words that are drunkenly crooned in every American piano bar every single night of the week. The couple gamely sang along. I missed a few notes. It is hard to play a musical instrument and sing at the same time, especially in front of other people. After the second round of “La-da-da-da-da-da-daaa,” my friend showed up at the front door, and I was allowed to stop.

“That was really nice,” said the husband, whom I have come to know better over the passing years, but who has never asked me to play the piano again.

Today, our busy family life means I no longer have time to play the piano. The cherry Yamaha mostly gathers dust in our living room, except for the occasional moments when our six-year-old wants to bang a few notes on it. I have tried to teach him “Chopsticks,” but he doesn’t have the patience for it. I would love for him to take lessons someday, but I think he would rather play guitar, if anything.

I feel guilty not giving such a nice piano the attention it deserves. I haven’t gotten it tuned in a couple of years. Someday, when things are less busy (maybe retirement?), I tell myself that I will sit down, re-master the handful of songs that I know, and learn a few more. Then we’ll have that dinner party with friends, and everyone will gather around my piano to sing along to a string of 1970s hits.