The History of Tommy Lee Jones

An Actor

Book III

Containing the Most Noble Scenes Which Transpired at the Institution of Higher Learning Known as Harvard University, from the Time When Tommy Jones Arrived at the Age of Eighteen, Till He Attained the Age of Twenty-Two. In This Book the Reader May Pick up Some Hints Concerning the Education of Young Men.

Chapter One

A Young Man From Tennessee Presents the Heroe with Strange Omens for the Future of Life on Earth

At this point it is prudent, if not necessary, to remind the reader that from the onset of this history the author has stated that no information would be imparted that is in any way false or fantasy, at least, to the best of the author’s knowledge of the events that passed. It is imperative to bear this crucial fact in mind, Dear Reader, as we follow our hero through the subsequent events of his youth, as pages that follow will seem an invention of a very creative author’s imagination. Though the thought will enter your mind, my dear reader, I remind you perish it, for everything you stand to encounter is as authentic as the words on this page.

Having arrived on the revered campus, an outsider from a minuscule, inconsequential village in Texas, our hero found himself very much alone. He stood there encumbered by boxes, duffels, and other accoutrement that a young man residing away from home for the first time may consider essential to life, and found himself standing just outside the dorm room to which he had been assigned, not quite sure how he had even gotten there. Dropping everything necessary to reach into his pocket, he retrieved a dingy old key and inserted it into the lock of the door marked B-12.

As the door creaked open, young Tommy was surprised to find, not only the lights already on, but another young man, his age, lying across the small bed to Tommy’s left. Upon seeing the door open, the young man on the bed stood, dropping the book he had been reading. He was of an impressive height and muscular build, but knowing that our hero is of more than average height and build himself, the reader will not will not be surprised to learn that this was not the first peculiarity of which Tommy took note. He glanced down at the bed to the book that the young man had dropped when he stood: Global Warming, An Ever-Growing Threat.

“I guess we’re going to be roommates,” said the tall young man. His voice was deep and stilted, but his drawl was unmistakably Southern, which put Tommy at ease straight away…

From a procrastinate Tom Jones, Book II, Chapter 2:

“To deny that beauty is an agreeable object to the eye, and even worthy some admiration, would be false and foolish. Is not Love is like candy on a shelf? You want to taste and help yourself, do you not?” The Reverend began to warm to his theme, particularly as the question of Mrs. Quiver’s recent escapades required extensive commentary and earnest moral reflection. “Mind you, it’s not unusual to be loved by anyone. Nor is it not unusual to have fun with anyone.”

Let us briefly at this moment, dear reader, note how the Reverend was in no way oblivious to the true factitious presence of the lady in question. Her breathing, dare we go further and suspect panting, presence was tempting the periphery of his homiletic sights even as he nudged his arguments toward the politely non-disputable. “It’s not unusual to be mad with anyone. It’s not unusual to be sad with anyone.”

“And yet.” Mr. Norbutwait could not resist the opportunity for interjection. “She’s the kind I’d like to flaunt and take to dinner.” In his urgency he seemed most unaware that his punctuation of the Reverend’s disquisition had become a confession. He became transformed. “And she always knows her place. She’s got style. She’s got grace. She’s a winner.”

Alas, poor Norbutwait at this moment was a plaything of his humours. Mrs. Quiver’s eyes, however, betrayed nothing, and the Reverend’s extemporizing was not to be eclipsed by such fevered tender display. “We’re always told repeatedly, the very best in life is free and if you want to prove it’s true, baby I’m telling you, this is what you should do.”

The Reverend seemed to reverse course at this moment, and are you not, patient reader, wholly relieved. “These matters are of a very delicate nature, and the scruples of modesty should compel us, nay command us, even with our knowing it is never modesty’s place to command.”

We may discern the Reverend’s precipitous halt is noted by Mrs. Quiver, whose eyes catch the shuffling churchman’s at this point. It takes but the lady’s mouthing of a certain intimacy, “What’s new, Pussycat,” to Mr. Norbutwait’s surmise, to bring the Reverend toppling into an improptu translation a certain passage from one of Horace’s lesser regarded ecologues:

Just help yourself to my lips
To my arms just say the word, and they are yours
Just help yourself to the love,
In my heart your smile has opened up the door.

“O, dear lady, I long simply to touch the green, green grass of home.” The Reverend falls upon his knees with this expostulation and gathers a portion of Mrs. Quiver’s skirt in his hands and begins mopping his brow.

“But to make this the sole consideration of marriage,” said Lady Quiver, laying a hand upon the shoulders of the dear Reverend, shoulders that continued to lurch in tearful confession, “to lust after it so violently as to overlook all imperfections for its sake, or to require it so absolutely as to reject and disdain religion, virtue, and sense, which are qualities in their nature of much higher perfection, only because an elegance of person is wanting: this is surely inconsistent, either with a wise man or a good Christian. And this point I must come to Mr. Norbutwait’s defense. He always runs while others walk. He acts while other men just talk. He looks at this world, and wants it all.”

Mr. Norbutwait did not hesitate to take an opportunity so generously offered. “So I strike, like thunderball.”

“O why, why, why Delilah,” was what the Reverend muttered as he rose to his feet.

A Waste of Shame

In which the Adults of a pleasant Town are Ensnared in their Efforts to Protect Two YOUNG PERSONS from their Better Natures

CHAPTER THREE

As you have seen, dear reader, the virtues of small town living so often extolled by the more reactionary among us for its salutary benefits were not without their pitfalls. As the buttocks—and thighs—of our young hero, and heroine, continued to mature to perfection, it would take more than the perversity of this author for them to escape the notice of those among whom they lived. Divine forces perhaps could provide for such an escape, but I trust it is clear by now that divinity has little role in our proceedings.

It’s not as if, of course, these physical attributes were the topic of open discussion at the Music Committee meeting at First Baptist or the faculty lounge of Bretenton High School. One of the very real virtues of small town living is that such things cannot be discussed openly, and therefore the race of lust for youthful beauty is impeded by its very secrecy, born of shame and concealed in furtive heat. So no one admitted that he or she was enthralled by the very sight or thought of Tristan’s firm and perfect rear.

It must be said, however, that Mrs. Butler, First Baptist’s organist and a woman of not only of real talent and discernment but also of still viable personal attraction, was quite distressed to realize that her attention during warm-up of the youth choir during Tristan’s junior summer was often wandering from Mr. Temple’s capable baton to the boy’s sneakers, up his shapely bare legs to—Well, she was mostly able to quash those thoughts, quite consciously. But she was also conscious that the hair on those legs was continuing to darken and sprout.

“Such a nice young man, and growing so tall!” she allowed herself to think, and often told his mother so.

Blake Temple, young and handsome himself and new to his position as minister of music at First Baptist, like everyone else in Bretenton found the boy’s beauty startling and distracting. As he maintained eye contact with all the members of his youth choir, scanning the healthy young faces in turn, he found Tristan’s face disruptive to his rhythm; he lingered a second or two longer than he had been trained to do, returning Tristan’s bright smile, simply because Tristan’s handsome, open, friendly face invited him to do so. He was not bothered by this phenomenon, nor was he similarly overly aware of the young man’s haunches.

These kinds of thoughts may have remained unshared in most of Bretenton’s sanctuaries of adult power, but there was one place where these thoughts were not only common but expressed, indeed encouraged. I am speaking of course of the coaches’ office in the gym at Bretenton High School.

I am not suggesting for a moment that George Burton, the head coach, was lusting after the beautiful Tristan. No, indeed, all of his totally inappropriate remarks, made to one assistant coach or another, were about Jesse, and those were many and inappropriate. He assessed Jesse’s ass with a determined wonderment and was free with his assessment with the mostly younger men in his immediate employ, and some of them returned his enthusiasm, although without the element of determination that they failed to detect in him.

And yet. There was an anger, whenever Tristan was in his gym, that bubbled over a constant low heat, and the sight of the boy was a constant push on the dial of his control. His irritation with Tristan was irrational, a fact he knew but could not reject, and so he found himself constantly watching the boy, haranguing him, chewing him out for minor or imagined transgressions, all in the name of improving his character and correcting character flaws that, if pressed, Coach would have been unable to define.

Coach, if he had been forced to talk about it at all, would have said that his frustration with the boy was due to the obvious attraction that Jesse showed for Tristan, although if you will recall it was an attraction of which she herself was not aware. It was jealousy, he would have said, although naturally he would not have admitted this to anyone in his circle; Jesse was a minor even if she were not a student, and he was acutely aware of what happened to coaches who screwed little girls or even entertained such thoughts.

In his grimmer fantasies, he would succumb to a grim smugness when he considered that Tristan was not a minor, barely, and could be made to suffer the consequences of consummating any attraction he might feel for Jesse. This knowledge served as a ghostly justification for Coach’s abuse of Tristan Oh.

He also told himself that his more vicious moments were caused by his medication. Suffering from anemia, he received testosterone shots once a month at his doctor’s office. Besides the sore arm—he bruised easily with his fair skin—the irritation he felt could easily have stemmed from the wide fluctuations of testosterone in his bloodstream. Or so he reasoned; he never charted his outbursts on the gym floor and in the locker room against the dates of his injections.

But in fact, Coach’s anger stemmed from a simple and pure resentment of Tristan. Beyond the usual attributes of youth that the older generation holds as grudges—energy, untried sexuality, an unreasonably taut abdomen, to name a few—Tristan’s extraordinary physical beauty was an added goad to Coach’s aging despair. Like Blake Temple, he found himself looking at the boy more often than was usual for him, but unlike Blake, this engendered a discomfort that blossomed as rage in Coach’s soul. It was not Jesse’s ass that was disturbing George Burton, it was Tristan’s.

For his part, Tristan knew only that Coach didn’t like him. He was always yelling at him for no reason or for some trivial reason, and Tristan, not a young man accustomed to rebellion, simply tried to lay low. It never occurred to him, either, to try to please Coach. If he just tried to stay out of the man’s way, he could sometimes, though not often, get through practice or weight training without being yelled at.

Jeff gets there first:

Kana’tï And Selu: The Origin Of Game And Corn

William J. Bishop

The Strange and WONDERFUL History of WILD BOY, an Indian Foundling

FIT THE FIRST

AN INSTRUMENT OF INTRODUCTION, as is proper, for the rendering of the tale of the WILD BOY, a Cherokee infant, whose MARVELOUS AND MYSTICAL JOURNEY was first related by an aged SORCERER of that selfsame TRIBE, and the VERACITY of which was STEADFASTLY attested to by the WIDOW of the FORMER MAYOR of the Town in which said WONDROUS EVENTS, even though otherwise wholly unsubstantiated, were said to have occurred SIXTY-THREE YEARS prior to this Author fixing them into print.

Chapter One

It would be preferred, naturally, that a tale as lacking in verisimilitude as the one forthcoming were related as Testimonials, or even Memorials, from the persons who were said to have participated in their unfolding. However, that transference not always being practical, or even desirable, on occasion the responsibility for enshrining these events in letters will fall to a man of lesser experience — particularly insofar as experiences directly relating to the story in question — and so certain details may necessarily be omitted, or else invented, perforce, by the Author to illustrate the heretofore oral odyssey in anything more than a strictly perfunctory manner. Such being the case in this instance, the Author shall endeavour to restrain himself when presented with dramatic possibilities that, while doubtlessly engaging, have no real basis or root in fact, and particularly when said paths would do nothing to Enlighten the Reader in ways that are illustrative of character motivation, psychological subtexts, natural proclivities, foibles, et cetera.

With those caveats firmly in mind, let us begin our tale with a house — nay, something more akin to a wigwam — the stile of which aspired to be something more grand than that which could be afforded. This stoic abode leaned unapologetically against the eastern side of a hill, nearer the bottom than the top of it, neatly impressing upon one the notion that this perhaps once proud refuge was in the midst of some precarious descent. Dear Reader, look not too closely upon this withering abode, for doubtless it cannot bear the burden of such heavy scrutiny; the glare of the eye, the cluck of the tongue: such immodest sighs of disapproval could — as mercilessly as a cyclone or some other vile, unrestrained intemperance, Natural or otherwise — shatter the footings of this tender hospice, and send the stones of its foundation tumbling down the hillside like so many acorns in the whirlwinds. O Gentle Reader, do restrain thyself, I beg of thee. Withhold thy judgment until this seemingly modest tale approaches its promised magical fruition. If then, perchance, the Reader’s appetite is yet unsated, consume then the house and its occupants. The Author will not interfere. But until then — as an indulgence, perhaps? — abate, be contented, and accompany us, arm in arm, on our incipient Journey…

In the ongoing free-for-all in the Alice post, Kevin posted a quote from philosopher/physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenburg: “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”

In the Wikipedia article, I found the following:

Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first ever hydrogen balloon, and although he always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding’s Tom Jones, he never finished more than a few pages. He died at the age of 56, after a short illness.

And so our challenge is to write our novel à la Tom Jones (text here), but only “no more than a few pages.”

Today is Tuesday, albeit late, December 11. Your “few pages” is due by midnight, Saturday, December 15. Email it to me in some text format, and I’ll post each one as I get them.

There are some rules, of course.

Rule #1: You must use the phrase “dear Reader” at least once.

Rules #2: Let us agree that “no more than a few pages” actually means fewer than 1,500 words. If you must write more, write the d—n novel.

Other rules, in comments, as they occur to you.

Rule #3: Cut-off for rules is midnight, Thursday, December 13.

Rule #4: You cannot go all Five Obstructions on our ass, Marc.

Rule #5: You may ignore new rules, but save all radical versions of your work so as to discuss them.

Tomorrow is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. As an example of mass hysteria, it’s pretty hard to beat. You simply go to the website, register as an offender, and then strive to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days. Many people do this. I know a couple.

However, I am not one of them. I often wish I were, which I know is insane, but I have this secret desire to have written a novel. Notice that I did not say that I hanker actually to write a novel; I just would like to have done it.

I did it once, of course. Back in the Adolescent Lit course we all had to take, we were given a choice of either a) reading and reviewing 70 young adult novels, or b) writing one. Ptttt, I said, if S. E. Hinton can do it, I can do it.

So I did it. Every Sunday morning at church, during the sermon, I’d outline the next chapter, then write it during the week. I think it ended up being fifteen chapters (not counting the “suppressed chapter 13”) and followed the fortunes of some teen members of a community theatre. Go figure.

I still can’t tell whether it’s any good, of course. The kids at ECHS I let read it (not all involved in the theatre, thank you) enjoyed it and clamored for more. The one agent I sent sample chapters off too several years ago returned it with a snippy note saying it wasn’t “creative enough,” whatever that means.

So why not do it again? I had started a sequel. The first one was Twelfth Night, New Day; it balanced the main characters’ emotional lives against the lunacy in Shakespeare’s play. The next one was called I Love You in Earnest, and of course our gang was doing Oscar’s masterpiece. I had decided to see if I could write a teen novel using a quasi-Trollopian discursive style (this was the early 1980s; it’s been done since), and the focus was going to be on a newcomer who was openly gay and how this raised the whole question of who is/who isn’t. You can see how that would dovetail into the whole Wilde/Earnest thing.

I never finished it. Either I lost steam, lost interest, got too busy at the theatre/GHP/whatever. I seem to remember not being able to figure out what would drive the plot; I had used a false alarm over sex in the first one and didn’t want to repeat that gambit. I had some vague idea of our newcomer’s performing an act of perfidy, but I couldn’t pin that down. What on earth could he do that would deserve the name? I didn’t want to involve his sexuality; that was a separate theme.

Anyway, here we are at NaNoWriMo and I envy those people who are going to crank out 1700 words a day. So what’s stopping me from becoming one of them?

The main reason is time, naturally. I have to crank out a dozen more songs before Christmas for Moonlight, and I’m getting nowhere fast on that project. Adding another daily task would be madness. Of course, part of me suspects that I might find my creativity charged by the daily task. Stimulating the brain to knock out the 1700 words every day might carry over to writing of lyrics and/or music. It might.

I could even make it about a guy writing a musical. I could.

Another very real reason, however, is that I don’t really have anything to write about. I know, I could just start writing. No one really writes a novel in November. They just write 50,000 words, which I suppose they wrestle into shape in the months between this November and the next.

But I really don’t have anything to write about, not like the way I have things to compose about. I have ideas and urges for the symphony, for Maila’s trio, for Moonlight, that I just don’t have for characters, plot, theme, and dialog.

There’s also the problem, and it’s personal, that any thing that I write about that looks even half like my life, and what else would I write about other than schools and theatres without having to go research the whole thing, raises immediate suspicions about just how much my characters are me. I’m thinking of our author Z now.

Finally, there’s the problem that I am not really an acute observer of humans, not even myself. In War & Peace, young Nikolai Rostov is finally about to see action in battle. He’s had a run-in with a superior over another superior who stole from his friend Denisov, and sitting on his horse waiting for something to begin, he starts to fret about this superior’s being so near to him and yet ignoring him. Within one paragraph, his mind concocts four different reasons for the man’s behavior. That’s the kind of incisive understanding of how humans work with which Tolstoy fills 1200+ pages and I can’t even imagine.

So, anyone else going to do it?

Tired of getting nothing done, and yet not up to the sustained effort required to write music or lyrics, I headed over to my super-secret website, Things to Do Before You’re 60, and made a concerted effort towards my goal of contributing 25 items to the list this summer.

I wrote ten, which is pretty good. I do wonder about Mike, the coworker from Newnan Crossing who talked me into this. Where has he been all summer? He probably lost the URL or his password. I should email him.

Oh, you want a list?

• Travel to another country
• Keep a journal
• Give someone a surprise party
• Develop an expertise
• See Casablanca
• Be alone
• Read children’s books
• Learn some constellations
• Streak
• Read a great classic
• Write a thank you note

This is not as easy as it looks.

Here’s something else that’s not as easy as it looks: writing 100 facts about yourself. Try it. I have started a list, somewhere on my computer, and even including things which I would never tell anyone else, I’m only up to 73.

24 days to go.