When The Grass Looks Greener On The Other Side Of The Gulf

As 2009 was skidding into history’s ditch, it was a stellar way to wrap up a year, with all the makings of a buddy movie. Two friends — adoptive brothers, really — trekking hundreds of winter-lashed miles to attend the wedding of a third.

Both the bride and groom live in Los Angeles, as does a sizeable contingent of the guests. The happy couple, however, instead swapped vows in the deep-freeze flatlands of central Illinois, a location mutually inconvenient for just about everybody … except, of course, the bride’s family.

Thus, after my flying into Omaha and linking up with crime writer Sean Doolittle, the road trip leg of the journey cut through a monochrome wasteland of asphalt ripped up by the Midwest’s icy Yuletide blizzard, and littered with dozens of spun-out, flipped-over, half-buried vehicles still awaiting salvage.

This is not traditional wedding weather. This is weather that compels you to drag the brass monkeys in off the porch, cluster together, eat and drink a lot, make new friends, talk yourself hoarse, and laugh yourself delirious.

In all this, something unexpected and kind of reassuring emerged.

There were a lot of creative, accomplished people assembled for these nuptials. The bride is one of the head writers on the SyFy Channel’s series Eureka, with several TV movies also to her credit. The groom, our non-biological brother, is currently in the Warner Bros. TV Writers Workshop — one of 10 or so selected out of over 1500 hopefuls — that will almost certainly lead to a series gig upon completion.

Among the guests: A visual effects specialist who most recently worked on Avatar. His wife, an effects producer. A writer on Battlestar Galactica and its successor, Caprica. Another is a working musician. And so on. Wonderful people, all. I was fairly gobsmacked at the level and diversity of talent that had gathered for a couple days of celebration. I knew their work, in some cases, and liked it, respected it, even loved it.

Here’s the unexpected and kind of reassuring part: No few of them were gobsmacked right back.

It happened often enough that it seemed to Sean and me to be an identifiable trend. It wasn’t, in most instances, that they were familiar with our work. Novels tend to have a lower profile overall than films and TV. No, it was the fact that we engaged in it at all.

They couldn’t believe we wrote books. Entire books. They couldn’t imagine wrangling that … whatever it takes to crawl inside a blank Word document and come out six months or a year or longer later with a finished novel.

Why this reaction? I don’t know for sure, didn’t press, but maybe it’s this: that what film folk work on are parts of a whole. Even the writers of scripts, as important as they are, and as brilliant as they may be, still provide a skeleton of narrative. It’s the actors who jolt the characters to life, the lighting director who brings them in and out of shadow, the effects people who conjure the magic, the makeup artists who accentuate the positive and conceal the negative, and the director who rules over everyone.

But as writers of novels, even short stories, we do it all. While a film or a TV show is a team effort, the combined work of a small army, we prose folk are an army of one.

More than once on this trip I had occasion to recall and recount a parallel encounter from several years before, one that I’ll cherish until the day I die.

His name was Chris Whitley, and he was the kind of singer/songwriter/guitarist who seemed engineered down to the last chromosome to do what he did.

I’m one of those writers hugely influenced by music. When I wrote a novel called Wild Horses, there was no greater sonic influence on it than Chris Whitley’s debut album, Living With The Law. The entire CD felt like a soundtrack to the novel. During the writing, I compiled a more varied soundtrack that helped me remain deep inside the world of the novel; a couple of songs from Living With The Law went on it, including the title track, whose earthy yet epic sweep made a letter-perfect opening theme for the movie I saw in my mind.

Flash forward to an early April afternoon, another day of heavy, constant snow, one month after Wild Horses sold at auction for a very nice sum that pretty much saved my life at the time. Chris Whitley was booked to play at a theater across town. Doli and I already had tickets, but then I learned that a few hours before the concert, he was also going to play a few songs in a basement record store across the street.

Just Chris and his National steel guitar and his voice — that’s all he ever needed, really, to bring the magic. Like most creatively restless people, he ventured in several directions, but for me he was never better than when things were stripped down to these essentials, or when he was otherwise mining the sweaty, passionate roots of American folk-blues traditions, and managing to put his unique stamp upon them.

After he finished this mini-set, I handed him my copy of Living With The Law to have it signed. It’s rare that we get so timely a chance to tell someone how much their work has meant to us, done for us, and why.

It’s risky, too, meeting someone whose work you’ve long admired, although in Chris Whitley I encountered someone who had zero trace of ego, attitude, or affectation, but who was instead endearingly, maybe even painfully, shy.

Doli told me later that it was a fascinating exchange to watch, each of us in awe of the other’s abilities. Her phrasing, not mine. I’ll accept it. She’s the intuitive one, the emotionally eagle-eyed one. Me, I’m a moron that way, reluctant in that type of situation to attribute to someone much more than polite tolerance.

I enjoy dabbling in music, a fact that I spared Chris, but can’t conceive of writing songs like his. The melodies, the feeling, the precision of their lyrical imagery. He told me he couldn’t begin to imagine writing a novel. The size, the scope, the complexity.

That was okay. He helped a novel emerge anyway.

*

I originally conceived this piece with only one takeaway in mind, but now it feels more like two. Both seem like good thoughts for anytime, but especially for January, things worth taking into the new year, one to act upon and the other to remember whenever you need it.

First the latecomer: Take advantage of an opportunity, or create it yourself, to let someone know it if their work has really meant something to you. That it has added value to your life. Guaranteed: It’ll make the day better for both of you.

I was online, a few years ago, when I discovered that Chris Whitley had just died of lung cancer. I sat in front of the computer and cried like I never had before, or have since, over someone I’d met exactly once. But I’d never been more glad I’d been able to tell him about his music’s place in my life.

Now the other bit, the thing to remind yourself of as needed:

No matter what you do that you wish you did better, no matter how much you feel still lies ahead to be done, no matter how much room for improvement you perceive in yourself…

And no matter how accomplished someone else may appear to you, or how low you may regard your own efforts in comparison…

Someone still admires you for them. Right here, right now. This day. Maybe even the object of your esteem. From near or far, someone marvels at you. You do something he or she can’t imagine doing. In their eyes, you work wonders and magic.

So remember that this year.

Remember it … and keep doing your very best to deserve it.