On The Beach

Temperatures in the 60's

Which is depressingly allegorical . . . 

Two kinds of sandpiper

There's this kind . . .

. . . and this kind:

Sibs on parade

"It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is."

-- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, p. 309

The Busiest Subway Line in Manhattan

Dream diary, 8/18/08. I get a call from my drummer friend Michael who says that a member of his troupe dropped out of a gig today in Manhattan, and can I fill in? I haven't played guitar since I left Boston, but I say yes, and dig out the old weathered black case that holds my nylon string Brazilian rosewood baby. I also grab the leather zipper case that has the song charts and lyric sheets Shep Miller made out for me before he gave me the guitar when we were rooming together on the Cape.

In the back room of the rehearsal hall in Queens is one of those climbing walls that people exercise on, only this wall is made up of rocks representing old Tom Waits albums. They're differently-colored and textured, and Waits himself is sitting in front of them explaining that this is a promotional stunt for the re-releases of the newly-remastered complete Waits collection which Rhino is going to be issuing "just in time to suck up all your Christmas money," as Waits says. The rocks are placed at a sharp angle to the floor; you can actually walk to the ceiling by putting one foot on the climbing part and one foot on the flat wall opposite, which I do, because I want to see what Frank's Wild Years looks like. As I climb, I listen to Waits giving advice to a young kid who wants to be a poet. "A poet is the hardest thing there is," Waits says. "You have to be prepared to send your work out into the world and never get a reply. You'll be stranded on a desert island and each poem will be a message in a bottle that will never get you rescued."

Out of the rehearsal hall and onto the street, where there's a fair and a mob of people. I look around for street signs; I'm at the corner of 22nd and 2nd; there's a stop at 23rd and 3rd, which is the busiest subway station in Manhattan. It's also the last place that takes tokens, which means it's the only station in the city where the token clerks actually do something besides sit in their booths and tell you to use the machines. "That'll be five ten sixty," the clerk says when I get to the window. He drops a bunch of small bronze tokens the size of dimes in my hand, and I fork over a five dollar bill, two quarters and a dime. I'm still looking for the extra ten when he waves me aside, and I find myself on the other side of the turnstyle, but without my guitar or zipper case of music and lyrics. I lean backwards and with my right hand I grab the strap of my guitar case, and then snag the zipper case from where it's sitting in front of the booth window. Then I head up to the outdoor waiting area.

There are three lines at 23rd and 3rd -- uptown, downtown, and the shuttle. The shuttle is a kiddie-sized Magic Kingdom train that looks like a cake ornament made out of gingerbread and vanilla icing. As it pulls into the station, a woman behind me says "What train is that?" "It's the shuttle," I say, and she pushes by me to get onto it as the doors slide open with the scraping sound of wood on wood.

I take the uptown train to the performance hall, and when I get there, I see three well-dressed drunks staggering outside the main door. They all wear suits and ties and none of them can stand vertically without weaving around and around like a pendulum. I go inside and see a huge whitewashed hall with chairs and tables, and a small raised platform with three microphones and a drum set at one end. There's another drunk guy inside who explains that normally this is a beer hall. I nod and notice a ten-dollar gold piece on the floor in front of the stage. As I pick it up, the drunk guy laughs and says "And if we all weren't so drunk, we would have noticed that hours ago!" I look around; there are coins all over the floor, but they're all foreign--small Dominican dimes, big British pennies, and a couple of huge Mexican pesos that are as flat as paper and as big as my open hand. I put those on stage next to the mike I'll be using and try to think of a way to work them into my pre-song patter.

There's still a couple of hours before the show, plenty of time for me to hit a bookstore. If I remember right, there's a Shakespeare and Company on 23rd, but I can't remember the cross street. This means a train ride back, but I decide to walk, strumming my guitar as I go. It's been so long since I've played. The zippered case of music is gone, the guitar case is gone, it's just me and the guitar, but I'm having problems tuning it. I stop walking and stand by a hill and try to do a C Major, but it doesn't sound right. I can get the root and the major third, but the perfect fifth is escaping me.

Then I hear it coming from the hill, and I turn and see Ester, of all people, lying against the hillside like she's just about to sing "And I will marry the miller's son," with her long blonde hair braided into a tight little violin string that she holds between her elbow and her shoulder, and on which she is slowly bowing a G that fits in perfectly with the other two-thirds of the chord that I'm playing on my guitar. For a moment every atom of air in the world comes alive with the note we're playing together.

Then Ester smiles and says "I'm thinking of moving to Staten Island," and the disconnect is so jarring (Ester on Stinky Island?) that the observer part of my mind starts ringing the Dream Alarm ("Ding ding ding ding! You're dreaming!") and I wake up so hard I can hear my neck snap.

"Oh-oh, New England!"

Bonus points for the musical reference.

So Sue Me

Weekend Update Part 2

Things my niece Alyssa said to me while I was on vacation:

"You're fat."
"You're old."
"Your feet are ugly."
"Are you going to eat that whole sandwich?"
"Your fingers are like sausages."
"But listen! Listen! You're not listening!"
"Is the water warm?"
"This isn't warm--this is COLD!"
"You write a lot."
"You write funny."
"You read a lot."
"What are you reading THAT for?"
"This is stupid."
"The grille is on fire! The grille is on fire!"
"One minute--honest! Just one more minute!"
"Will you take a walk with me?"
"Why do I have to walk with you?"
"You still read COMIC BOOKS?!?"
"Stop taking pictures!"
"If you put a picture of me on YouTube, can I sue you?"

Weekend Update Part 1

Saturday at the cottage, there were two parties: one for my cousin Brian, who turned 50 on Friday, and a surprise anniversary party for my brother David and his wife Cindy. Plus the kind of pictures that reminded me why I kept getting carded till I was in my late 30's.

First up: me and my sister Monica, who was going through her Dorothy Hamill phase at the time:




This is me with Nana Wells, my grandmother on my father's side. As you can tell from her expression, nobody in our family ever has a good time doing anything.


And how many years has David been married? Hmm; I don't know--why don't we check his ass?



Yes folks, this is my family.

Vacation Diary

Music I listened to while doing the rewrite:

The EmFire Collection, Sasha
Global Underground 27: Miami, Danny Howells
Global Underground 30: Paris, Nick Warren
The Hours, Philip Glass
Communicate, Sasha & Digweed
Transport, Max Graham

Vacation Diary

July 10th part 2. Sat on the beach from 11 till 3. Finished The Name of the Wind, and can't believe I have to wait till April of '09 for the second book in the trilogy. Started The Spa by Fay Weldon, which is like a modern Decameron -- clever lady. Made notes for noir story/novel based on old non-noir movie I saw on TCM a couple of nights ago. (One of these days . . .) Remembered the story I dreamed up about how Shakespeare got the 1,000 pounds he needed to become one of the sharers in the Chamberlain's Men, and wrote down the bare outline of it. (One of these days . . .) Tinkered with the idea of making a novel out of both the play I just finished and all the scenes I didn't put into the play. Put idea aside as something to do for about an hour a day over the next month while I work on a romantic comedy. (My God--two plays with happy endings.) Finally read last week's New York Times Magazine article about suicide, and wondered if the availability of a firearm would have prevented this stupid tragedy. Memo to self: when I get back to New York, go into storage and dig out that copy of Neighboring Lives. Walked my niece down to the only store within a mile of the cottage and bought her a Vitamin Water and some candy. Went looking in the store for books to read; they had exactly six on sale, all romances. Took pictures of the moon after sunset and got eaten alive by mosquitoes in less than five minutes. And before going to bed, watched four episodes of Cowboy Bebop, all of which I'd seen before, none of which I'd remembered.

Vacation Diary

July 10. Long involved dream, but I only remember the end of it, when I ask Cheryl Peyton if we’re seeing the new Superman movie tonight. She shakes her head no, she can’t get away from her husband. I make a mental note to see it on my own and then act surprised when I eventually see it with her. But I’m seeing it tonight.

I walk home through Chinatown. At one of the bookstores I usually go to, I find a copy of a Rafael Sabatini novel I’ve been looking for since I don’t know when (The Devil In The Details). When I pay for it, the Chinese guy behind the counter asks me if I want a dragon too. “We have six of them,” he says. I say sure, and he goes in back and comes out with a dragon which has been petrified into a small jade statue. It comes with an instruction book about how to turn it into a real dragon, and what to feed it, and how to turn it back into jade. On the way past the Mercury Lounge, I see a line of people waiting to buy a dragon, and a guy in front explaining that they’re all out, they didn’t get their shipment in today, but there may be a few for sale at the merch table during the 9 PM Human Sexual Response Reunion Tour show.

From Houston, I cut through the Columbia campus to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Of the two elevators, the left-hand one is broken and getting repaired. The right-hand one works, and it opens when I push the button. I get in and push 6, then see the landlord coming. I hold the door for him, let it go, see a bare-chested guy in jeans coming, and hold it for him too. The bare-chested guy tells the landlord that all the bathroom work he’s doing on the sixth floor is flooding the apartment on the eighth floor. Without him saying any more than that, I know it’s my sixth-floor apartment he’s talking about, and that it’s the one across the hall that needs the bathroom work, not mine.

When the elevator stops on the sixth floor and the door opens, the bare-chested guy doesn’t move. He’s standing right in front of me and he doesn’t move when I say excuse me, so I say it a little louder, and when he still doesn’t move, I shout it at him: “EXCUSE ME! I’M GETTING OFF HERE.” He turns and looks at me like I’m the asshole for yelling, and pushes the side of the elevator, which swings away like a barroom door. I feel like an idiot for forgetting that this is how the elevators work in my apartment building, but I’m also still livid when I get out and walk through the open door of my apartment with a huge chip on my shoulder to find the place full of people building furniture and bookcases. That’s right--I remember now--my daughter is coming in from Boston to go to NYU, and she’s going to be staying with me for a couple of weeks until she gets a place of her own.

The workers all approach me to show me what they’re working on and get my approval. A tall brunette with her hair up and wearing a calf-length dress like an extra in a Forties film noir movie shows me a desk/chair combination that looks like one of those grammar school chair/desks, only the desk area on this one is ten feet long and tilts up at a 45-degree angle. I nod; good, Becky will like that. Another woman is building a mountain bike out of stray pipes and tires; she’s arguing with a young man about the way the chain drapes between the pedals and the back tire.

I check the bathroom. Yes, it’s leaking down to the eighth floor, I can see the puddle on the ceiling. As I come out of the bathroom, a balding guy with a moustache asks me about pepper spray. “She’s not here yet?” he asks, referring to my daughter. “No,” I say, “but she will be.” “When she runs away,” he asks, “does she waddle a little?” She does, actually, but I hesitate before telling him he’s correct. “You can be honest,” he says, and I say, “Yeah, actually, she does, a little.” “No problem,” he says, “we have three types of spray, the slow wide spray,” and he presses down the nozzle to release a thin wide cloud of mist. “The slightly more directed spray,” he presses the nozzle of a second can and it comes out like a shower nozzle spitting water, but it doesn’t reach as far as the wide spray. “And this,” he says, and presses the nozzle of a third can to release a steady hose of liquid, which splashes against the opposite wall. “Which do you think would be best?” he asks, and I wake up.

Vacation Diary

July 8, part 2. The mad scene writes itself through me in two stages, the second scarier than the first because I'm actually able to direct things towards the scene I originally planned but couldn't write in the first draft because all the sidetracks got in the way--the scene where Hamlet drives Ophelia offstage by telling her in essence the truth about himself. Because everything is more (directed? concentrated? meaningful?) in this draft, all I have to do is ignore all the chatter in the first draft and write the scene from scratch. Which is the scary part. It's like having a Mapquest printout and then ignoring it; there's a part of your mind that says, "Don't be stupid, use the map you have, didn't it get you to where you wanted to go?" And it did, but it's the journey, not the destination, that's important. There are a ton of roads you can take from Lights Up to Fade Out, and they all present a different scenic route. You have to map out the one with the best sights, and if that means throwing away yesterday's map when you do today's travelling, then that's what you have to do, and trust that you'll be steering everything in the right direction.

I use the word trust a lot to describe this, and when I do, I mean a kind of faith as well, a faith that when you take a leap you will grow wings and fly, a faith that when you start to write or talk to yourself (I do a lot of talking to myself) the words will come. And not just any words, but the right words. Meaning the character's words, not my words. (My words are another sidetrack.) Although in this play? There is a lot of fecking Matthew, and there are a lot of fecking people who will read this or hear this and know it.

I finish writing everything longhand at around 9 PM, and start typing in the changes and the new scenes. At about 10:35, I'm typing up the last bit of dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia and conducting a gmail chat conversation with Allyson in LA when Merry takes control of my fingers and changes one sentence of dialogue that changes everything for me. (Merry is Meroë, the name I've called my source of inspiration since the late 70's.) Instead of typing "I did too" in response to "I thought you were dead," I find myself typing "I was, for about thirty seconds." And the rest of the scene comes out of the nowhere that is the home of all inspiration, having nothing to do with the dialogue I sweated over this afternoon, having nothing to do with anything except the fact that I am at the laptop and the words are coming through my index fingers as I type, and they feel like the right words, they feel like wings.

July 9. After telling Allyson to mark down the time last night when I finished typing everything up (7:41 Pacific Time), I spent about 40 minutes walking around the cottage because I had so much energy inside me that I had to let some of it out or I wouldn't be able to sleep. I tried to read and watched the words slide away from my eyes. I tried to watch television and nothing I saw was anywhere near as brilliant as what I had just finished writing. So I ended up making a lot of tweaking notes -- things to plant, things to knock down that I've set up and forgotten -- and then went to bed.

Today I wake up at 8:30, and by 10 I've re-read everything, made spot changes, added echoes that I hope aren't too obvious, inserted a Jeeves joke, inserted a Court Jester reference, and added breathing room here and tightened things there. It's DONE. I e-mail it to the cast; I e-mail it to Allyson in LA; I e-mail it to the reading group; and I e-mail it to Ava in Australia with a cc to Ester in London. Then I go to the beach and fight off the sand flies and for the first time in 5 days (I started the rewrite on July 4th) I have nothing cooking in the writing oven. It's a good feeling; it's a full feeling actually, like I've just eaten a great meal and have a ton of bottled-up energy kvelling inside me. Take the rest of the day off, I think, you've earned it. And tomorrow when you get up at 8:30? You can start pre-heating the second script you brought down with you.

Vacation Diary

July 8. Woke up this morning a little frightened and wary about the mad scene rewrite. The energy leading into it is completely different now, which means I can't even look at the first draft. If I do, I will try to rebuild it from the original pieces, instead of junking everything from the foundation to the attic and starting from scratch. That is the scariest part: starting from scratch.

When I described it to Shannon, I said it's like carving a path in the forest. You have to keep going back to that fork in the road and chopping away until you find out where the correct turn is. Until you make the correct turn. It's all about recognizing the sidetracks. Sidetracks are short cuts. If it comes too easy? It's a sidetrack. If you tap it and it sounds thin? Sidetrack. If you stay on it, it will only lead you to another one. But once you come upon the true road, or a branch of the true road, the path you're taking will always reassert itself -- you'll feel wrong if you step away from it, and it will force you back onto it if you stray too far. Yeah, you can take side trips here and there, just as long as you keep them close to the main drag, just as long as you don't lose sight of that compass needle pointing you to home.

All of which means nothing if you stare at the forest long enough, if you stare at all the trees in your way long enough, and start questioning yourself too much. You always do, so there's no avoiding it. You always say to yourself, not just "Am I going the right way?" but "I have no idea where I'm going--how can I ever find the right way?" It's scary. Actually two kinds of scary. The kind that says "This is impossible" and the kind that says "You know you can do this." How do I deal with the scary? I throw away everything I've written before, put pen to paper, pick a turning point where the dialogue can go somewhere else, and start chopping away. And the road always appears. It always does. It may not look like the right road tomorrow, but that's tomorrow's task, not today's. Today's task is to get from A to B a better way than yesterday. That's what I owe the work.

I joke about the fact that I have to write the equivalent of four different plays just to get a single one that's good enough to put up on a stage. But I never joke about the fact that when I look at an empty piece of paper and just start writing whatever comes into my head, the words always appear. For that I will always be thankful.

Ocean Bluff, Low Tide

Vacation Diary

July 5. Overcast and dreary. I went to bed at 2 AM last night after watching 1776 on Turner Classics Movies. Everyone else went to bed at 3. I get up at 9 and start writing. Three cups of coffee and two hours later I've finished touching up Act One, extending the brief Hamlet/Ophelia scene in I,3 and adding some fortification chatter to Fortinbras. Still have to go back and give Phyllida some Dad stuff to chew over, but I won't do that till I write their scene and discover just what it is she's so pissed off about. The rest of the day is lazy. Nobody wakes up before 3 PM. I make notes for the Phyllida/Fortinbras scene, read the first 200 pages of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees, and actually see Allyson's Duracell commercial while my brother-in-law is watching COPS. I take a walk around 10 PM and talk to myself about the play while I'm snapping pictures of Ocean Street. Go to bed at midnight and try not to disturb the cat, who ends up sleeping on my feet.

July 6. Up at 7:30. Gather up all my notes for the Phyllida/Fortinbras scene and start writing them out in sections. Junk about four-fifths of what I've written and discover what they're arguing about as I piece the five best exchanges together into one scene. I can now go back and give Phyll a couple of definite Act One Dad moments to chew on. Finish typing up the new scene at 9:30, just as the sun makes its first appearance in two days. Twenty minutes later it's hazy again. Head out to the back yard to make notes for the big Act Two Scene 2 rewrite. Which is going to be more of a first draft than a touch-up, since pretty much all the opening chatter has to go, and Ophelia's mad scene needs to end with every volcano onstage erupting at the same time. As usual, I will have no idea how I'm going to do this as I talk to myself and transcribe as many different dialogue exchanges as I can. And as usual, it will all make sense tomorrow morning when I start to edit them together. Memo to self: this is how you need to live.

Fireworks, Ocean Bluff

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 5

The full moon hides behind a cloud
Just like a golden flirt,
The waves roll in and out as if
The sea’s raising her skirt,
And Ava walks the beach at night
In someone else’s shirt.

The stars are twinkling in the sky
Like sea glass in a stream,
The shadows lie like men in love
(They’re never what they seem),
And Ava walks the beach at night
In someone else’s dream.

The sea keeps reaching out to touch,
Then pulls back with a start.
The shore just keeps his distance and
Remains a thing apart.
And Ava walks the beach at night
With someone else’s heart.

The tide will wash up everything
Onto the shore somewhere.
It’s yours if you can find it.
Nature is cruel but fair.
And Ava walks the beach at night
Till someone else is there.

-- Matthew Wells, 7/8/07

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 4

"Find me a starfish!" e-mailed Ava, who is busy saving orangutans.

Here you go, honey:

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 3

Six things you can do on a raw cloudy day when you can’t hit the beach in a town where there’s nothing much to do except go to the beach:

You can e-mail everybody you know who’s stuck in work today and spend the entire day waiting for one of them to reply.

You can go see a movie with your niece and nephew, but since they don’t get up till after noon, and they’re not really human till about 2, the earliest show of Transformers you can see in the Hanover Mall is at 4:45, which is about the time that your nephew hangs out with his friends on the sea wall and your niece watches VH-1 while playing Mad Libs with herself.

You can read a book in the back yard and fight off the bees that think the pollen-like aroma of your Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil means that your face is the pistil in a strange new honey-providing flower.

You can watch a DVD on your nephew’s PlayStation, but you have to sit two feet away from the screen because the volume level on the TV speakers only goes up to 2 out of 10 when playing a DVD even though it can go to 10 of 10 when you switch back to cable.

You can work on that romantic comedy script you brought with you and drop it after ten minutes because you’re much more interested in plotting out the three new ideas you got on the beach yesterday.

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