creative writing exercise 7H

A fucked-up 14-year-old skates in the church parking lot and says to you, "This is how we pass the time in the evenings." You feel hard-focus, ready to toss away a talent to organize groups, and walk away, seeing people watch you and whisper in passing, "This is happening constantly."

Her plush old van looks crazy in front of my house even though neighbors know bad. She is high and says she has acid. We are older now. She wants to take me to the playground, and I say, “This is perfect.” Her dad had just said, “I know with me you feel less alone, but now you’re going to have to be on your own.” She told him, “You don’t look sleek. You lack style. You look weak.” Then she tells me, “I know what you need. And where to get it. And what it costs.” She says the night will go up in stoges and to start counting.

about the sense of a lost dream

Your body stops metabolizing after exposure—fever, suffering, no help through difficult hours remaining you put a thousand ideas in the universe nobody could see you. Certain a borg is a sign your mind is gone to flicker yet next season approaches as memories get thicker of teens in the garage 5 feet into the rain. Keep rounding until past is as big as a house and I cannot see these curled dimensions.

 

Electrons annihilate the charge and burn down the distance between us two stars.

about how dreams are interesting only when they are yours

Dreamed we sat around in your old room. But the room was a basement space, so I watched a guy at ground level cutting back shrubs. He cut way too much! Also saw a bouncy castle outside, your kid nephew about to have a birthday party. We amused ourselves somehow. I played with old action figures. A Krusty the Clown whose head was supposed to boing up on a spring, but the mechanism was broken. We wrestled, I flipped you—flipped you more skillfully than we could expect—and we started laughing hard and like when you laugh even though nothing particularly funny happened. Woke up in the laugh and felt like after Padre Island, how I missed this.

 

something about Richard Yates's "A Good School"

A Good School is a coming-of-age story set in a Connecticut prep school in the early 1940s. Students, teachers, and school officials all struggle as World War II looms in the distance.

Richard Yates based the fictional Dorset Academy on a school he attended, Avon Old Farms School, and 15-year-old William Grove is Yates's stand-in. Dorset, like Avon, is not an elite school.

Grove struggles in every class except English. His talent for writing eventually leads to a role as editor-in-chief of the school paper. Through work, he builds confidence and gains purpose. He also earns some respect and makes some complicated but meaningful friendships.

Yates includes personal notes in a foreword and afterword. He writes in the afterword that his time at Avon "taught me the rudiments of my trade." He also mentions his and his father's skepticism of the school and each other:

And is there no further good to be said of the school, or of my time in it? Or of me?

I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that—as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing "Danny Boy," taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time—all that is in the past.

Notes:
A Good School was published in 1978.
See my other posts about Yates: something about “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates, something about Richard Yates, and something about Richard Yates’s “Liars in Love.”