Now I'm grateful my parents didn't spoil me with their new found wealth, and that they lived pretty modestly themselves. It was good for them too, because they soon lost all that new prosperity in a bad investment. If they'd let money change them drastically, the adjustment back to lower middle class would have been excruciatingly difficult. And perhaps, because of how I was raised, I'm just not that much into things, which is good, as I'm a school teacher like my stepfather. I hate being poor, which I've been a couple times in my adult life, but as long as the bills are paid, and I have enough change to stop and buy a soda, I'm happy.
Back then, though, I wanted wealth to stand for something--mainly my missing self-esteem. Because of all the teasing I received at school, I would have really liked some symbol that I mattered. I had one specific symbol in mind--a black, Mercedes 380 SL convertible. I was sure that if I asked my dad to buy me one of those, and he did, my life would be completely different. Instead of having tobacco spit in my my face by a bully, I'd be cruising around town with his girlfriend. The only problem is that I didn't know how to ask my father to buy me one, and so I'd just dream. Odd thing is I never dreamed of the girls at my school anyway. I only dreamed of one girl, and she was back in Sandstone. I'd fallen in love with Kelly in the fifth grade, and in five years, with 1200 miles between us, nothing had changed. The only problem was that just like I couldn't tell my dad I needed a black Mercedes 380 SL convertible, I couldn't tell Kelly that I needed her gorgeous blue eyes, little upturned nose, soft freckled face, and oh so cool southern California attitude in my life. So, I just dreamed--of the girl, of the car, and of the Ventura Highway in the sun.
* * * * *
My parents first big check from the multi-marketing diet program they sold was $15,000. Until then, they'd been living on prayers after moving to Dallas. My stepdad, after all, was a school teacher. There was no big rainy-day fund if things didn't work out. The only furniture we brought with us from Utah was mom's organ and the mattresses that we slept on, and mine was placed directly on the floor. We bought a cheap couch and love seat for the living room, and that's all the furniture we had. I remember I used one of the boxes I'd packed my clothes in as a nightstand in my room.
Then the check came. With that money my parents hired a secretary, bought her a desk, and the rest of us went shopping for antiques at Joe Small's Auction House.
If you knew where to go, antiques in Texas were cheap in the 80's. They'd bring shiploads of them into Houston from England. Apparently, in Europe everything was considered old junk unless it was at least a couple hundred years old. Why that would be so, who knows, because furniture from the 1800's and early 1900's is still very solid furniture with elaborate woodwork compared to the particle-board crap made today. And oh the smell of hundred-year-old wood! There's nothing like it.
Anyway, we had an apartment with no furniture, my parents came into some money, and my dad learned about Joe Small's Auction House. The first time that we went it was to buy necessities--dressers, bedstead's, night stands, etc., but it quickly just became a fun night out together as a family. It was every Thursday, and it often went until midnight. One night my dad gave me $40 to buy whatever I wanted, and that began my short but joyful career as an antique's dealer.
Oh I loved the auction. We'd show up early and walk around, letting the old dark woods and oxidized mirrors on buffets, sideboards, and wardrobes speak to us. We'd feel the curls on intricately carved leafs and scrolls that decorated the tops and edges of massive edifices of wood. I especially liked high furniture, like highboys and wardrobes. They reminded me of early skyscrapers, like the work of Louis Sullivan.
After the look-around, came the action: the auctioneer rattling off numbers hypnotically; the colored cards going up--some discretely, some with great finesse and power; there'd be the bidding wars, which were usually friendly, but occasionally not. There'd be the gasps of wonder when somebody got a steal, and the laughter when someone overpaid. Most in the crowd were dealers and came every Thursday night. They were competitors but also colleagues. They knew and appreciated each other's business. It was like being around a great big dinner table and fighting over the bowl of mashed potatoes.
My parents had a family friend, Jim, who lived in the same apartment complex as us, and he had a booth at Vikon Village Flea Market in Garland, Texas. There he sold great oak dining tables that he bought factory-direct in Alabama and transported to Dallas. I don't remember what piece of furniture I first bought from the auction with my $40, but I do remember Jim allowed me to sell it at his booth. I remember that I sold it for $80, doubling my investment.
I wasn't in business long, and I didn't always do well, but I had fun. However, this is not where I tell you that from this youthful adventure I learned the hard knocks of capitalism and went on to become a successful entrepreneur. No, instead, this where I first encountered books. They were not particularly good books, and as reader, I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for, but I was drawn to them just the same.
Now, we lived next to a library, and my parents had church books back in Sandstone, so it's not like I'd never seen a book before. But the church books just sat on the shelf, unread. And at the library, I only checked out art and architectural books. I'd read parts of them for the information, but mainly I was interested in the pictures. It never occurred to me that words were something worth encountering in any other form than song lyrics. Up until recently, I'd never been captured by a story.
But I had an exceptionally good ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker, and she had us read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I loved that book. I equated Estella with Kelly back in Sandstone. Why I did that I'm not sure. Kelly was beautiful, and she was a sophisticated girl, from southern California, which from the vantage point of small town Utah, seemed pretty worldly. However, she was never haughty nor mean to me. Still, as my shyness kicked in around seventh grade, her mere presence became an intimidation because in my mind she was just so much more of a creation than I was. She was perfection and I wasn't. The way Dickens described Pip feeling around Estella was how I felt:
Though she called me "boy" so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was bout my own age. She seemed so much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed, and she was as scornful of me at if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen. (Dickens)
It wasn't that Kelly was haughty; it was that to me her mere presence was scornful because of her perfection. It was like placing Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere next to a black velvet Elvis painting sold in a market stall in Tijuana.
I was all too aware at an early age of just how beautiful women really are, and for some reason, I never saw any beauty in myself. As far as I was concerned God simply goofed on half the population, and as a male, I was bound to grovel before their majesties. Ridiculous, I know, and it set me up for a great deal of pain, for if a woman is unapproachable simply because of her mere existence, how is she ever going to become a best friend, or even something more? Knightly love is such a damn foolish thing, but I had a bad, bad case of it.
But, longing for Kelly connected me to Dickens' Pip and Estella, which connected me to books. One day, wandering around Vikon Village Flea Market, I found a bookstore tucked back in the back corner. I say store because it was more than a stall. It actually had walls and windows, though if I remember right, no roof other than the massive metal one set on steel beams that spanned the entire city of peg-board stalls. This seller was permanent enough to erect walls and bring in tall bookcases that were crammed full of dusty, aged books. I have no idea if any of them had any value because I had no knowledge of books or literature what-so-ever. Something immediately pulled me towards the books. I thought I might find another one by Charles Dickens. I wanted again to enter a world like Pip's, to feel the cold fog settled out on the marshes by the sea, to sit by the fire with Joe, and most of all, to feel again the awe of seeing a beautiful girl again for the first time. I never knew words could do that. I'd been deeply moved when I read Joseph Smith's account of the first vision, but I had never experienced the tactile nature of words until I read Dickens.
It was new, and I wanted more. I entered. The books looked so amazing, row after row in shelves, stacked on tables and chairs in jumbled piles. And the aroma! Old, dusty books are amazing. New ones can't compare. I'm not sure how I found Dickens. I had no knowledge of how to navigate a bookstore. But I did. It was a hardbound book with a worn, dark blue, linen cover with his portrait embossed in it. If I remember right, it contained three novels. I still have it somewhere, but I can't locate it just now. But, I think they are A Christmas Carol, A Cricket on the Hearth, and A Tale of Two Cities. I read a Christmas Carol and worked my way very slowly through A Tale of Two Cities. Though I never completed the latter I was astounded by the language, dazzled by the description of the wine running down the cobblestone street:
A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of the a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine shop, shattered like a walnut shell.
All the people with in reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infant' mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish... (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)
Wow! The imagery, the sound--together how they did implant an experience in my head. Years later, the scene would bubble up again mixed with marshes from Great Expectations and Picasso's Blue Guitarist to create a poem:
Blue in a Baroque World
Through some worm hole
there is a cobblestone lane
lined with oil lamps
and pocked with rain.
Galaxies of light unfold
in ripples spreading out
in gathered darkness
puddled at the bottom
of a high hill.
The ragged man
with the blue glow
hears a violin in his soul
cut a coarse chord
that says I'm so damn tired
of this. It isn't his loneliness though
he knows as well
as high halls
and crystal chandeliers.
He'd like to pound a harpsichord
until it squeals like a pig. For
some reason he can't explain
he knows traces of God
puddle in the mire
at the bottom of the high hill
where a long tide pushes in
to fill the mud flats
obsidian pocked
by cold hard rain.
Dickens gave me God in low places, Christ as he historically was, among the people who needed him most. Wine; stone; torn, tired feet in need of washing, of healing, of transcendence.
Moonlight on water that slowly fills the bay with absolutely everything. I wanted--no, I needed God that way.
References
Dickens, Charles. Tale of Two Cities. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes &
Nobel, 2006. 954-955. Compilation.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes &
Nobel, 2006. 1214. Compilation.
