Beginnings.
They’re important for a writer. You hope they’ll be
interesting enough to hook the reader. Give them reason to read more.
Here are some of my beginnings I particularly liked:
On my drive home from work Friday evening I stopped at a
traffic light, glanced left over at the driver in the other lane and saw
myself. No, not the me now, but the me I was some 30 years ago.
Cricket carefully backed her crummy car, which needed a
motor mount bolt replaced, down her cousin’s driveway. She was driving extra
cautiously these days because her license was suspended and she had two weeks
to go on her probation before she could pay the bastards another $90 to get
reinstated, which was beyond bullshit because that last DUI was totally fucking
unfair. She hit the breaks when she heard Samantha’s voice on the car radio.
(Jeremy)
I had two phone calls from Don before he killed himself.
Each call should have tipped me off. Maybe not the first one, but certainly the
second. I couldn't have gone to him anyway, he lived in another state far away.
Still, I could have done something, called somebody. I wonder if Don knew at
the time of the first call–the first contact I had had with him in three
years–that he was going to commit suicide. When do suicides know for sure, just
before they pull the trigger?
Mr. Brown closed the door on the whimpers and walked up the
stairs to take a shower. He stood under the stream of water and leaned his head
against the wall of the shower stall. "Mommy loves me. Mommy loveth me.
Mommy loveth me," he whispered to himself as his heart slowed.
There really is a Kansas
Children who grew up on military bases are called Army
brats. Asylum brats were those few of us who grew up on the grounds of state
insane asylums where our parents, who worked there, had housing provided by the
state. We weren't shoved from base to base, state to state, country to country,
so we couldn't claim we didn't put down roots. Instead, we were buffeted
between the bizarre personalities among whom we lived, if we chose to know the
lives of those mostly benign inmates–excuse me, patients–from whose lunacy our
parents earned their livings.
I was on my way to report the extraordinary X-ray finding to
the chief conservator when I encountered her in the hallway waddling like a
penguin toward me in her daily dress of black pants, white blouse, black vest.
Stella said, "Ah, Edgar, we need to talk."
The skies were cloudy all day.
Since morning, Fred and I had been peering out of the tiny
windshield of his car as the overhanging sky loomed above us and met the
horizon: flat and far ahead. The black metal skull of his even-then ancient
1935 Ford, with its sets of human eyes, prowled the sand roads across the
prairie. It was late afternoon. I was driving. We were both irritable.
The most important summer of my life began with a
house-shaking thunder-boomer that woke me up on a Thursday night in 1958 near
the end of my fifth-grade school year.
I walked out of my bedroom to the living room and saw Dad,
in his brown pajamas, standing at the window looking out and up at the fury in
the sky. On a nearby table, the transistor radio was playing softly so he could
hear the news of any tornado sightings. He held the flashlight in case the
power went off and we had to go to the basement. His hand was tight around the
aluminum cylinder, holding it as if it were a club he could use against the
weather. Dad had good reason to be cautious.
Bob Crowley, drunk and very tired, almost tripped over the
broken toy truck before kicking it out of his way then trudging around the side
of the house to the back of a former duplex that now housed six families of
50-some Christian souls. Work on the Great
Christian State
of Kansas
"I like these kinds of snows. They cancel things
out."
The voice that broke the silence in the cold room had the
gravel-grumble tone that smokers get and keep – even after they stop smoking.
The nervous plucking of his hands at his worn, brown sweater said he still
missed his cigarettes. His lined, but healthy, blood-perfused face meant he had
smoked heavily most of his life before something had made him stop. Bypass
surgery, I diagnosed.
Fred Underwood was driving his 15-year-old, once-white, now
rust-speckled Nissan pickup six miles oven
several things happened to him.
He saw a sign announcing—as though proud of the fact—that
gasoline at the upcoming station was selling for $4.15 a gallon. He looked into
the rear view mirror when he heard a siren and confirmed that, indeed, a police
car was chasing him. He uttered, “Shit,” but then felt his body swept with
euphoria: an idea smacked him that would make him rich.
David Lopez sat at a table on the patio of the most popular
outside cafe at the Kansas City Plaza Enclave on a warm, early spring day and
was depressed at the thought of how happy everybody around him seemed. How
satisfied they all are with their own lives, enjoying this day, their meals and
the music of Mozart from the string quartet. His model, Gloria Barnes was
snarfling alfalfa-soy sprouts and babbling about her studies in Buddhist logic:
"The thing that people don't realize is that Buddhism has a much better
grip on what is real than any other philosophy," she said, pausing to curl
her tongue to the side of her mouth to catch a wayward sprout. "For Plato,
reality is truth. What is cognized as true is real. For the Buddhist, reality
is efficiency. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that TOMORROW?"
Edward Hawthorne had no premonition of the first disturbing
and later horrifying consequences that would result from his joining the
Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society.
At seven-thirty on a fresh, cool Monday morning in the
forty-fifth spring of his life, under a sky the blue of which General Motors
used for its 1957 Chevrolet, the Rev. Christopher Talley looked into the trunk
of his BMW, aimed his thick, index finger at the objects stored neatly away,
and stuck up his thumb.
"Bang," he said, as he pointed his finger at the
portable typewriter, depressed his thumb, and heard the knuckle crack. He
shifted to take aim at a stack of reference books, and then in rapid order went
"bang, bang, bang, bang," at the dictionary, the thesaurus, the
Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer. Father Talley aimed the finger next at
the large, expandable file and, with the loudest mental bang of them all,
blasted that well-worn cardboard structure and all of the pieces of paper the
damn thing contained. He thought about pointing the finger at his own head, but
reached down instead to caress the fly rod case, pat the tackle box, and run
his hand across the stack of journals on studies into ancient Greece
I hadn’t seen that good-lookin' motherfucker for almost a
year when he walked into The Fat Cat with his partner to ask me about the dead
dancer found that morning in our dumpster.
I think back to the 1960s too much now. Not sane. A fixation
on then is no way to deal with now. My fascination with those times is not the
kind of healthy diversion with the past, the way an interest in history can
become a worthwhile hobby. Maybe it's worse than a fascination or a fixation;
maybe it's an obsession. Can obsessions ever be worthwhile? Probably not. I
know I long too much for the psychology of those times, the psychology of
others then, of the me then that is so different from the selfish, cynical,
jaded, boring psychology of the times, other people and – I fear – the me now.
Why write this? To expunge the obsession? Can't hurt; might
help. Maybe in the writing I'll find the worth.
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