Strawberry Fields

    The strawberry field had no weeds in it. And the soil smelled pleasantly of cut grass and decay. I was a fearless kid; I liked to do things that wrecked you. Hardship did not deter me. In fact, hardship was interesting. So I got down on my knees, and dragging behind me the crate of quart containers, I began to pick the strawberries.
  Bob Anderson, the boss, a handsome, blond man, seemed to like smiling but he had not recently smiled at me. He lived in the stone house on the bluff overlooking his fields. The house was a mile outside Peru on the Pewter Road. While he cleared his fields he had gathered stones to build the house. The roof was tiled, and the windows were gabled. Then when Earlin Emerson, the florist, retired, Bob Anderson bought both of Earlin’s beautiful glass greenhouses. Mr. Anderson directed Charlie Sturtivant, Vic Slade and Emil Kasmirek to disassemble the greenhouses and to transport them on Charlie’s flatbed truck into Mr. Anderson’s field. They erected them just as the winter of 1955 was setting in. They broke not one pane of glass, because Bob Anderson was not an ordinary man.
  This greenhouse and the flowers and seedlings in it used to jump out at me. The plants’ beauty assaulted me, and their fresh perfume made me dizzy. They emptied my mind into a swirl of confusion. Sometimes I’d wander into that greenhouse and dream with big eyes about heaven and earth. Mr. Anderson turned toward me a granitic profile and studied me with eyes sidelong.
  I wanted to know more about those plants, but a stone wall of misapprehensions blocked my way. I was preoccupied. By nature I was inclined to believe what I read in books. I read God was dead, and the word “nothingness” had on me a big influence. My inflamed mind gave many things a strange slant, which made impossible certain simple everyday understandings. I was “existential”, which meant to me that it was not necessary to get too put out over anything. The stick figures that represented workers in my Civics textbook at school did not get too put out. They were existential. When the production ceased, the workers went home. But the plants went on working, and they worked assiduously. In Mr. Anderson’s greenhouses they worked all day and all night. They were a load, a mystery. I sighed, I liked to hang out in the greenhouses. Plants didn’t look at all like I imagined was nothingness.
  One day my father said, “Eddie, this is a good day to work. Today you must earn a dollar.”
  I agreed. It was a good day to earn a dollar. I could wreck myself today. I went into Mr. Anderson’s strawberry field. Only a few people were picking, so I was alone with my vaguenesses.
  Mr. Anderson was disinclined to waste words in introduction or explanation. He had given me my crate of quart containers and he sent me off to work. Obviously, he was not a man like the ordinary. Why should I ask questions?
  But where were all the ripe strawberries? I looked back over my shoulder at the beautiful greenhouses. Pallets of potting soil and trees, whose roots were wrapped in burlap, and too many different gardening tools for me to learn all their names were clustered in families around the greenhouses. A plumb greenhouse of glass would capture my imagination and fascinate me the rest of my life. Maybe I could have been better employed?
  On this day most of the strawberries were a sickly yellowish white color, but a few were red and lusciously ripe. Nevertheless, Mr. Anderson had sent me, and I must wreck myself to earn a dollar.
  As I crawled along, searching for red strawberries, I considered the sickly berries. Might they also be tasty? Why do strawberries have to be red to be tasty? If you could pick a few sickly berries, you could earn a dollar more quickly. Besides, as the sun ascended higher and the field got brighter, the berries seemed to become brighter, too. In this brighter light red berries could dominate the future.
  In fact, they could take over. So a battle was brewing, a war of reds and whites. The reds outflanked the whites and rushed to the attack through a thin filament of green. That must be General Ike, the ripe one in triumphal pose, humongous in the battle’s center!
  Could the crop today be worth picking? Maybe it was a new crop just coming in, or an old crop languished past picking. What did that matter to me? It was not even lunch time yet, and I still had to get wrecked. But I could eat any time. My lunch box was full. Eat like a barbarian! Beat my chest! Work at least until lunch. Besides, dreaming in a sunny, green field was a happiness even if there was not much fruit to pick.
  Toward high noon the sky towered to the dark blue that signified the edge of outer space. Shredded clouds took up positions here and there to guide the sun into prominence. Under this warm sun the berries that were actually red looked indescribably delicious. I believed that the juice must taste like ambrosia, though I was unclear on how ambrosia should taste. I should be picking, but how could I forswear eating? It was as if the berries spoke to me: so red, so ripe, so round. Under a distant, secluded leaf they hung lusciously. I ate some of the best fruit. Pleasures are so fleeting in this world. Put by a berry in a jar! Where has it gone? I came to the only logical conclusion: it looks good, so eat it.
  Quite a few people came into the field that day. They tried picking, then they quickly left. They must have been weak, while I was strong. I persevered. I searched high and low. I didn’t care how hot the sun was or how tired I got. I endured.
  Big forces began to collide in my head. My father was on one side and the rest of the world on the other side. Then next against my father was Mr. Anderson, who I already knew was not an ordinary man. My father had said that I must work to make a dollar, but Mr. Anderson might not find this battle of reds and whites amusing. He might throw my bounty in my face, and the crushed berries’ juices given to the parched earth. What should I do?
  I had done work; I was still here. But there were not enough berries to make a dollar and go home to rest.
  I began to fill out my crate with imperfect berries. The naturalness with which I fell amazed me. Failure and boredom, boredom and failure made resisting hard. Boredom and failure were existential; resisting was like church, which had never worked out for me. I absentmindedly adjusted the bad berries, slipping them with a damp forefinger under the good. It was the same absentmindedness that allows life’s hurtful facts to be softened and embellished.
  Then the light over the strawberry field became gray. A gentle sea breeze had cooled the air, a sign of afternoon in my home town near the Atlantic coast in New Hampshire. A tender weariness came over me. I picked up the crate full of quart boxes of berries and lugged them down the path toward the big greenhouse. As I entered the greenhouse I tried not to look sick.
  “Oh, God, you! I forgot about you,” Mr. Anderson said. “What have you got there?”
  I laid the crate on a nearby work bench and took out the quart containers.
  “No!” Mr. Anderson laughed. “I can’t sell half these.”
  “Sir,” I said, knees trembling. “I want a dollar.”  
  Mr. Anderson was an extraordinary man, and he was a hardass besides, but I was more afraid of my father. I liked wrecking myself, and everything was good except whatever had for whatever reason fear attached to it.
  “I won’t give you a dollar. I won’t give you anything. Look.” He spilled out a quart on the table. Some of the berries were good. He angrily tossed the bad ones into the trash.
  “I want my dollar,” I repeated softly.
  Before he could reply I was astonished that my father walked into the greenhouse, smiling. “Hi, Eddie. How was your day of work?”
  Mr. Anderson had become agitated. “I can’t give him money for this,” he said.
  Father examined the berries spread out on the bench. He laughed. “Mister, your crop has gone past. How should he know? Give the boy his money and we’ll go.”
  “These are not worth anything,” Mr. Anderson said.
  “You got greedy,” my father replied. “You are squeezing your crop past prime. And now you owe the boy a dollar.”
  “Greedy? Fine!” The cash register crashed. He took out a crumpled dollar, and thrust it at me, and said, “Don’t bother to come back.”
  Father and I hustled outside. With face red Mr. Anderson stood in the doorway. Father and I climbed into the old Studebaker. Father drove down Old Peru Road toward home.
  “Sometimes it is hard to tell when a job is not worth doing,” Father said. “And nobody will be anxious to tell you. So you have to figure it out for yourself.”
  A darkness came over me that made me breathless. Perhaps in my life the darkness never really did go away. Sometimes it still closes in if I am not careful. I worry that I am a person who has failed in life because I was not cut out for work.

The Red Trailer

This is a story taken from the Annals of Pablo. If you'd like to visit and read more of my stories go HERE.

Death the Unknown

This story is part of a collection called US Delivery. You can find more of it here. I hope you will consider reading all the stories. Thanks. Pablo.


                                   Eddie turned around in Hustler's parking lot and headed out to Boylston. Eddie loved this part of town. It was home of the Boston Public Library. When he was first happy to be out on his own and shifting for himself, he was twenty, he loved that library. He used to walk among the downstairs stacks and bury himself in there for an afternoon. He had lived in a cellar room a few blocks away on Beacon. Copley Square and Trinity Church were toward town and the Pru next door away from town. The other side of Boylston from the Prudential Center was lined with cubbyhole places, restaurants, bars, stores.
  Only the commons from Brattle to Stewart, the blocks surrounding Boylston and Chinatown stations, created a more intense warmth in Eddie’s cogitations. On weekend nights he watched the dark ladies humorously carry on among the tourists, the theatre goers, the sight seers. Drunks, hanging out on the benches along the edge of the commons, staggered through the crowd. The cops reverently stood on street corners; the equine unit seemed to come out of the dark of the middle ages, their horses huge, calm and shining. Eddie used to park near the corner of Tremont and Boylston where there was a row of public telephones. While he took in the crowd, he made his calls, looking for one more long ride into the night.
  Now, next stop for US Delivery, a magazine and card store, was a block or two down Boylston from Mass Ave. Though the sky remained overcast, the afternoon had become stiller, less raw, and the folks on the sidewalk swung along smiling and chatting. Besides magazines and cards were also in the store amazing records and movies. It was a stop Eddie had been ducking all day. He was a little afraid. This could get really gross. The shop leaned toward the homosexual, but there was plenty that was heterosexual, too. The proprietors were well put up and constituted young men. Handsome, in fact.
  “Ah-ha, a true testament to freedom of expression,” Tom said. “I wouldn't miss it for the world.”
  An empty parking slot was nearby the shop to wiggle the van into.
  “There are two guys who run this place,” Eddie said, “and they are not jackasses, at least not complete jackasses.”
  “Oh yeah they are,” Tom said.
  Tom hustled out of the van, dived into the crowd, brusquely made his way toward the door. The dumb prick, Tom, his best friend, did not even offer to take the rags up for him. Eddie waited a minute. With all he had gone through already, he shouldn't embarrass himself by throwing up. He got out a big handful of the rags. He was supposed to deliver fifty. He guessed there must be fifty. Then he went upstairs.
  Tom, the proprietors and a squat, powerful, brown man were all in a loud circle, laughing their asses off. Then Tom disappeared into the back of the shop with the brown man. Eddie neatly dropped off the rags on the table beside the cash register.
  One of the young men stood nearby. “Oh, look what they've been up to,” he said. He looked all shiny as if he had just stepped out of the shower. He glanced at Max blowing Maxwell and laughed for a minute.
  “It's a wonder,” Eddie agreed.
  “I don't know why they do that,” the young fellow replied. “It gets everybody all in an uproar.”
  Eddie shrugged, turned and wandered around the place. Something about it was interesting. The paintings on the walls were primitive, blunt and almost cold in their depiction of the sex act. He stared at one picture for a long time, looking for a shred of meaning, found none. Was it his Catholic upbringal? He wondered why God could not have thought of a better way to do it. Eddie was always grateful when he got the opportunity, and he could never think about it in a cold way.
  There were fancy, well published books about porn, with large color glossy pictures of this and that. One section had novels in it that were supposedly pornographic. Eddie thought about buying one. He didn't know what a pornographic novel was. The way novels often were nowadays, it was hard for him to imagine one that was not pornographic. So Eddie was just slouching around trying to dig the scene when a young man silently approached beside him.
  “Anything I can help you with,” he said.
  He looked awfully young. Eddie understood that he must be an employee. He wasn't by any means handsome like the proprietors, though attractive in a friendly way. His voice was soft, intimate. Eddie turned to him, “No. Just observing.”
  “The owners do spend a lot of time getting this together.”
  “Seems so.”
  He was slightly shorter than Eddie. He turned up his eyes, now cool, matter of fact. “I don't belong to the store, really. A lot of people ask me when I get out. I'm here every day.”
  “Well,” Eddie sighed, “I'm busy all afternoon. I'm just generally busy.”
  “Okay. Well, I'll be around if you need anything.”
  Eddie hoped the kid had had eighteen good years before he started all this, but he doubted it. “That's enough,” Eddie thought. Casting a dry glance at the cash register counter, which had been abandoned, he sauntered out.
  Funny, he felt queasy, but he didn't feel like he was gonna throw up. It was a dry nausea. One time Eddie had taught this route to another man who, once he came out of the store, turned all red, then he barfed into the gutter. But this man was not cut out for delivery work. He couldn't find the roads. Eddie sat in the van waiting for Tom.
  Tom had a knack for slipping by. He may not be too hot about hugging a tree, but he turned his back on nothing, ever. That was different from ages before when educated persons were unenlightened in the displeasing details. Not Tom! He dug in and took a good look. Tom wasn't about to be the least bit nauseated. Tom liked to shake up people with expostulations on the poor and the desperate work of the common people.
  But at some point in his life Tom had come to believe that everything worked out for the best. It was the belief of bookish people. Eddie took it with him as undeniable fact that for a lot of people nothing worked out for the best. Then they were taken early in life as a sort of sacrifice. How could some people enjoy a long life unless other people suffered a short life?
  The possibility of a life consisting of ninety years of misery went over Eddie's head; twenty-five years of misery seemed to him more real.
  Tom came out grinning, jumped in.
  “The husky, brown guy,” Tom said, “he's really into it. He and his wife make tapes of their screwing. Do they ever turn it on! Then they press records out, sell them. Look!” He held up a brown manila envelope. “Ten bucks.”
  “And you don't see anything wrong with that?”
  “Sure I do. It's squat, but it's human. It didn't occur to me where he got the sounds, so I asked him. I was curious. He didn't seem too put out about telling me. He said it was a big surprise how many records he sold. They are really getting around.”
  Eddie pulled out. No traffic. He did a u-turn and headed back up Boylston toward Mass Ave and turned right, drove over the bridge past MIT into Cambridge.
  “I figure,” Tom said, “when I die, after I write the big masterpiece, some digbat scholar will find this record and he'll opine, humph, at least he was human. And anyway, what are you in such a mood about? Nobody dead, nobody transfigured. Jeese, it has been kind of boring.”
  “Kid up there hustling.”
  “Really. Damn. Wouldn't you know I missed it!”
  “Fifteen, sixteen, maybe.”
  “God's plan?”
  “Tommy, please!”
  Eddie would remember that confused, pale, damp little face for the rest of his life.

              ✻✻✻✻✻✻✻✻

  Not long afterwards Eddie moved into a brownstone on Hemenway only a few blocks from the Boston Museum of Art. But it didn't work out because he got sick on too much art. He had to keep some distance from it. He got really sick. Too many things were happening. He was just a neighborhood kid. So he went to the open clinic on Hemenway. Kate Hunt was the nurse. Nurse Kate, who was pregnant, a tall, gangling, loose jointed woman with a great mass of strawberry blond hair, bore a striking family resemblance to the boy in the porn shop, whose image was still, though months after the fact, bothering Eddie's nightmares. Just so happened while Eddie was chit-chatting with Nurse Kate, in sashays the boy! It was an odd coincidence. His name was Stevie. At that time Stevie was cross dressing. But Eddie recognized him immediately from the porn store on Boylston.
  “Hi,” he said to Eddie.
  “Oh, you two know each other,” says Kate.
  “Darling,” said Stevie, “I know everybody.”
  “We don't know each other,” Eddie said. He was feeling so sick from his overdose on art that he was in no mood for kidding. He just wanted some pills that would knock him out. He was gonna park the van for a month before he smashed a big dent in the dashboard with his head.
  Stevie smiled and giggled. He went to sit down out of the way, picked up a magazine.
  Kate took Eddie into an examination cubicle. “He's my brother, the little hustler,” she said. “He has been that way all his life. It's a miracle he's still alive.”
  Eddie met Kate on the streets every now and then because she got around. Stevie was sick, then Stevie was dying, and then he was dead. “He died,” she said. She and Stevie had the same eyes. Her eyes were big, dark, damp.
  “Do you think God forgives stupid people?” She said.
  “He must. Don't make much sense the other way.”
  In the case of Stevie Hunt an early tragic death. This is not a soap opera! If you want a soap opera, well then screw. His body started to shut down when he was twenty-five. He was incapable of taking care of himself, and the law does not dispense mercy to suicides, it doesn't dispense anything. He was in and out of the hospital, then he died in 1984 when he was twenty-seven. Maybe a twinkle of happiness, no sound and fury, but his life did signify nothing.
  The poor kid never had a notion, so he never had a chance. Eddie always thought a great monument should be erected over his body in memory, for Stevie was just one of the multitude of that period who died without knowing anything.

Why not Hug a Tree?

This story comes from my collection called US Delivery. Please consider reading it. You will find US Delivery here.

                     Eddie was driving down the Jamacaway. He was in no hurry. Even in midwinter it was a pretty road, and the clouds had broken for awhile and the sun now and then poked through. Just another day in the history of US Delivery. But Eddie was a little pissed off at Tom. Tom was a poet and Eddie was a delivery van driver. There were lots of things going on. Why was Tom buried in that book? The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Why didn't he raise his eyes and take a look around. Why should there be a book which could fascinate you away from this real world going by?
  “It's a great book,” Tom explained. “It's about Philosophy. The guy who wrote it, Ludwig Wittgenstein, got notoriously famous in a time when hardly anybody cares about philosophy. When he wrote it after World War I, in which he was a common soldier, he considered that he had written the last word on metaphysics. Then later on in his life he considered, I personally believe, that since nobody understood his last word, how could he think that he had actually written the last word? Which is a cogent thought. I don't think he ever repudiated the book. Some people say he did. It's not unusual to repudiate your own work; it is unusual to really mean it. Sometimes it is hard to make people understand what you have written about. They don't want to believe you when you tell them. You wonder about all the confusion, especially when you have tried hard to be clear, unless you are a general like Russell or Whitehead or Sartre. Wittgenstein's biography is very interesting. I like him because he seems to know instinctively when the object got taken out of multiplicity and put into context with the unity. I think that it is a gift from God to be willing to struggle with objects that way. It's a brave thing to do because you alienate yourself from the rest of the world which hardly ever thinks about anything in relation to unity. In fact they get mad at you if you think that way. They want the multiplicity, because you can make money with it.”
  “But what does that have to do with today?” Eddie said. “We're going through something. Something is happening. And I don't know what. What does it all mean? What is the glue that sticks us all together. Don't you remember what I just said about the man who killed his wife and two children? Why haven't the human race exterminated each other yet? And sometimes in the face of extermination we even love each other.”
  Because this had just been going on. It was all over the news on the radio.
  “I know! and what you say is true, and it is a mysterious wonder. But what does that have to do with me? What can I do about it? How can I deal with it? On the other hand, I can deal with this.” Nodding at the book. “Which ultimately is about unity. All philosophy is about unity.”
  “I say just the opposite. What can I do with your unity? Where is it in the world? How would I know what it looks like even if I tripped over it? Anyway, we live most of our lifes in the dark, tripping over stuff, and half the time lost in discord. Then sometimes real happenings show up in the darkness. Then that's when you put up the dreams and try to do something, try to help out somehow.”
  “The trouble with that, Eddie, is usually it's all done with by the time you get there and all that's left is for the bruises to heal. So you're just getting in the way, wasting everybody's time, when you could be studying the beginning.”
  “The beginning? What's that?”
  “What preceded! Take war. You can complain and bitch, send sons and daughters into the battle, and genuinely grieve when they get killed. Or you can ask the eternal questions, like: What hath God wroth? Or you can shout at the suffering, the death and dismemberment: Thy will be done! I think it is as well either way. I wouldn't want to judge. But for me, who I am, what is important is how the beginnings work. Eddie, I know our comrades suffer, that life is hard, that it doesn't make much sense sometimes. But what is that to me? I am too busy. Why even should I care whose fault it is? I don't know how it came to be that I am plugged in that way. But I think it is important for somebody to study beginnings. That is what culture is, it hooks people up to beginnings.”
  Eddie said, “It is a sin to lose touch. It is a sin even to separate for a minute. Your hands must always be in it with dirt on them. I hate those snotty bastards who preach culture, but they never pitch in, they never cooperate, they are always in a sort of never-never land. They never see themselves as an influence on what's happening.”
  “Nobody is in never-never land. They may wish they were, but they aren't. I know where I am in space. It's just that, doesn't being in real space seem routine? Just a little, while Wittgenstein on logic, for instance, is…it gets to the head. And I find that much more pleasurable. That thought stuff rattling around in the head. Oh, what bliss!”
  “It's cold, Tom. How many times have I told you that? All that stuff for the head is cold. And why do you say it is pleasurable? You make it sound like you are addicted to pleasure. Why do you say that? When you should say, ‘I am addicted to what is important.'”
  Tom turned toward Eddie slowly, studied him, “Who are you to tell me what is important?”
  “I have more experience in life than you do!”
  “You do not!”
  “I do to. And if you spent less time with your nose in a book or a blank sheet of paper, and you lifted your eyes, and you honestly looked at what was out there, you'd know exactly what I am talking about.”
  “I should someday attempt to explain to you what vanity is,” Tom said turning away.
  “Tom, if anybody should know about vanity, it should be you, who writes poetry. Do you actually think that you have anything to say that's different or that hasn't been said a hundred times before? Or even worse, that you could say it in a way that is somehow superior?”
  “Oh yeah, and you're going to tell me that all this snooping around that you do is going to lead you to a spiritual awakening? The way you're always checking in on the girls in the combat zone, gadding around the big city? Is that what's going to make you a believer?”
   “Do you think I'd be gadding around if I knew? It has to be somewhere. I think you have to put your hands on the facts of existence, and after you walk in the ashes, you should do something, you should hug a tree. Here!” All along the Jamacaway in the middle strip and in lots along side the road were trees and public gardens. Eddie pulled over into the turn off. In summer this garden was often pretty; anyway it often caught his eye. In winter there was at least the stand of oak trees, but winter foliage too, and fir plants of some kind. “Come on! I want you to put down that book and hug a tree.”
  “I don't want to hug a tree,” Tom said. “You nut. You go and hug the goddamned tree.”
   “I intend to. But you come with me.”
   “No! I'm not gonna hug a goddamned tree because I don't want to be a nut like you. I'm gonna sit here and read this book because why? Because Wittgenstein was born with a certain genius, and you weren't.”
   “Who is talking about genius? I'm just talking about hugging a tree, which is a real thing in God's creation. And I'd like for you to tell me how you could be confused about it. You belong to nature, too, or have you forgotten?”
  So Eddie was pulled over and he stopped the van, and it was suddenly quiet in the van, and he studied Tom. “Well come on, ya gonna?”
  “No, I'm not because I don't wanna seem like a nut like you are. Ya freak!”
  “Here, let me help you!” Eddie reached for the door latch, pushed it open, and he was kneeing Tom out the door, Tom's book went flying, and he fell out of the van. Tom cussed a profanity laced big city brogue, and they both cussed out each other as they pushed and shoved each other till they ended up in front of a tree.
  “This is one of the tallest ones. Look!” Eddie said, bending back to look at the top limbs. It was perfectly straight without a single branch for the first 20 or 30 feet. “It's a red oak, I think. I think it is beautiful. I am going to hug it and kiss it.”
  But that was Eddie. When he was a child he used to dream about what it would be like to be a North American Indian say 1,000 years before the Pilgrims. Fitting in with that enormous nature, its rhythms! He'd find the soothsayer, the medicine man! Silence in the big woods! Hunt! So Eddie hugged the tree. Tom snickered, scratched his head.
  “Come on! Now you do it!”
  “No! Don't wanna!” Tom shouted. “Because I don't want to look like a freak.”
  But Eddie pushed him up against the tree, and Tom put up his arms and almost did it. Then he stepped away, adjusted the bill of his ball cap and headed back toward the van. Eddie laughed at him.
  “You're running away from the real thing, aren't you? Because you don't like it. Because you're scared.”
  “No I'm not! You're delusional.”
  Tom jumped in the van, slammed shut the door, retrieved his book.
  Eddie stood among the trees, sighed, because he had a long way to go before this day was done. Why did he so often look forward each day to a time when he was done and had nothing to do? So he could dream about hugging a tree.

A handsome young Oak, straight and tall.

A nice, youthful trunk for hugging.