Forty Nine

by Wolf DeVoon

BOULDER, CO - It's funny how some memories never fade. A quiet moment brings them back - the jolt of an IBM Executive typewriter hopping diagonally across my dad's steel office desk in 1956, a solid metal monster that took four men to move, hard gray rubber top and six thick drawers that were strong enough to stand on. The smell of unexposed film in my first camera. Two stout gold hinges that swung a ton of vault door in my grandfather's real estate office. The thrill of my ten-year-old foot touching a broad iron step, my hand reaching for a cool white ladder taller than I was, exploring two diesel locomotives idling in a switchyard, walking the narrow ribbon of deck to study every inch, every rattling door and compartment. Those engines throbbed with astounding power, ready to pull 100 cars - sullen black coal carriers and battered red boxcars that I climbed and walked across, trying to understand what it meant to be a man.

No one forgets being in prison. "Count time! Count!" No one forgets being raped - but that was later in life - much later. The best memories are innocent.

Her name was Janet Czsny. No lovelier girl ever walked this earth. We were both fourteen. It was a blazing hot day and we walked for miles before I told her to lay down in a thicket of tough, tall grass. I flattened just enough of it to make a nest for two, the summer sun scorching our clumsiness for an hour and making it right, somehow.

I'm old enough to remember the clatter and tinkle of hot metal linotype, the sound of coins cascading through a pipe, to emerge as greasy little rectangles of lead that chugged into words, fifteen words a minute. The stink of mimeograph ink and soft blue cotton stencils that had to be corrected with dope. The square nuts and razor-sharp stamped girders of an Erector set. My first radio - a round cardboard Quaker Oats box with forty turns of enameled wire and a cat's whisker crystal. The headset hurt no matter how many times I tried to adjust its sprung metal headband. Each earphone had a hard Bakelite cover that unscrewed to reveal a bright steel disc that floated on two bright silver strips, the poles of an electromagnet as big as my fist, cloth cords meeting in a 'Y' at my throat, coiling and kinking in knots that meandered to two fat banana plugs.

I was a thoughtful kid. I drew mushroom clouds and blueprints for a family bomb shelter. I studied every Civil Defense booklet I could get my hands on.

Fat, round sausages dancing in a bathtub-sized kettle, enough to feed thirty Boy Scouts. Red candied crabapples on a picnic table where white-haired grandmas spoke German and never smiled. Hot jelly-filled donuts at 5 a.m. in the bakery behind a neighborhood grocery store. A saltine with cold raw ground beef.

My first bottle of beaujolais nouveau, at a quiet cafe in Holland when I was 33 and ready to kill or be killed. My first car when I was 17 - it cost $50 and ran about an hour before the engine blew up. Every moment of life superimposed, all of the days and hours stacked on a shelf somewhere in the back of my mind - there for a reason, waiting to be put together again, to rally 'round and splice the thread of life's purpose, in case I forget who I was and still am.

Balancing on a rickety ladder on a cracked plank four stories above Hollywood Boulevard - reaching over my head to hang foot-tall, broken plastic letters that were patched with electrical tape, spelling out the name of somebody who paid $100 to showcase at a nightclub. Crawling through an attic, buck-naked at six o'clock in the morning with my clothes under my arm, seconds after a husband pounded on the back door, threatening to kick it in.

And then - suddenly - I'm back in the present, walking somebody else's dog in Boulder, one more day until her owner returns. It's bitterly cold, clear and crisp under a black dome of twinkling stars and crescent yellow moon. Three states away, my wife is getting ready to drive 1000 miles. It's hard not to worry a little. Nevada and Utah are desolate; western Colorado is tough on motors.

I'm six years old in a doctor's office; nineteen at Woodstock; forty and sitting next to Mel Gibson and Mary Hatfield, my elbows on a snow white tablecloth, nodding "yes" to the maitre 'd with a thin little gesture, just half-lowering my eyelids.

I'm haunted by those I loved and lost. Rich Griner. Larry Scott. Dr. MacCallum. Alejandro. Clare. Lee Keshena.

And haunted by the bottom line - the thing that is uniquely me. I remember every pencil line, every sketch I drew, every layout I designed and every word I wrote. It took a long time to learn how to write.

I kept nothing. Tens of thousands of feet of 16mm - gone. Thousands of pages and dozens of videos, tossed away, never satisfied. But I remember every splice, every shot, every bounced check and prop. Tom says I remember them wrongly. Queenie swears I have the worst memory ever parked in a skull. But I remember the important stuff - like the color of Jim Butterfield's hair and the stumbling pressure of his forearm leaning on mine when we walked together. Karen Adler's shattered hope. Eileen's freckled smile. The day I was kicked out of high school.

Forty-nine this year? That's what my driver's license says. Starting a new life in Colorado, a brand new job with a fresh agenda? Bullshit. I'm four and fourteen and every other year rolled together.

It's the price of integrity, to carry the whole of yourself, everywhere you go.


WOLF DE VOON is a writer and educator who has recently moved from Scotland to Boulder, Colorado, USA. His most recent contribution to the G21 was on Soldiers Who Sweep Landmines in Bosnia.

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