Thomas Sullivan

“Quiet onstage, please!  Go live with the mics.  Cue Aretha Franklin.  R-E-S-P-E-C-T…find out what it means to me!”

Oh, that haunts me.  See, I done a bad thing once…um, more than once.  And it seriously disrespected Aretha.  Can’t tell you the details because – well, I just can’t.  But it has to do with 128 squirrels, and a pink Cadillac, and a roofer I met – on a roof – in the remnants of a hurricane, and a house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and midnight sojourns, and a G.I. Joe doll.  And Aretha Franklin.  So I listen up whenever she sings her mega-hit song, as if she is staring down her nose at me and wagging a finger in my face.

What RESPECT means to me when I’m inventing characters is: do not underestimate a human being.  I have to believe it’s the same for any writer trying to breathe life into meaningful characters.  After all, you become The Creator when you manufacture mortals, and even though you’re doing it with paper, would God make paper dolls? 

This has nothing necessarily to do with virtue.  Not that kind of respect.  The capacity for evil can still be there in these characters you’re respecting.  Evil as greed.  As self-centeredness.  Megalomania, lust, pride – count the deadly sins, and when you get to seven, keep on going.  Respect the range in people, is what I mean.  It doesn’t even have to be their depth.  If superficiality, or aimlessness, or innocence, or ignorance, are what you are illustrating, a shallow person makes a spiffy character (e.g. Candide, Billy Budd, Mishkin, Huck Finn, Casper Milquetoast, Walter Mitty, Oblomov).  But most people are genuinely complex.  They are worthy of sustained examination as they evolve through life or the chapters of a book.  As authors, or just students of human nature studying erect bipeds with hair, it is one thing to delineate a truly simple subject and quite another to simplify a person because of our own lack of insight. 

But that’s what we tend to do as observers of people, isn’t it?  Simplify them.  Rob them of dimensions so that we can fit our minds around who we want them to be, or because that’s as much as we see.  Our limitations become the authors of their limitations.  Sometimes we do this because we want the world to be black and white, sometimes we do it to rationalize our relationships, but most of the time we are just modifying individuals to fit the collection of stereotypes in our minds.  Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t want a collection of (borrr-ring!) stereotypes, no matter how much simpler it makes sizing up life.  Sure, you need familiar patterns in order to make sense of people or put them in context.  But what you don’t need are so few patterns that you end up distorting the people you know to fit them.

A writer may have a natural bent for uncovering layer upon layer of meaningful characterization.  Or not.  The people I know who I consider have the most insight into their fellow humans are not writers.  What they have is enough objectivity to eliminate their personal motives in sizing up others.  You can learn a lot if you consciously and objectively slip out of your own combat boots and stand in the shoes of whoever you meet. 

That said, I love it when I’m caught ignoring my own advice.  The aftermath of underestimating someone or taking something for granted is when I learn the most.  Last month I promised that if there was enough interest I’d go one more column mentioning things from the Dominican adventure (there was), so that’s where I’ll turn here for an example of really stepping in it.

Recall, if you will, the richly peopled textures of Villa Esfuerzo, an impoverished and crime-blighted village in the Dominican where I spent 8 days in June.  I told you about the people who sit ankle-deep in water in their living rooms, and about the songs and dances at the worksite, about the children with luminous eyes, and the handbags woven from bread wrappers, and the tarantula badlands.  This time I want to take you to downtown Santo Domingo, population 2+ million people.  Welcome to The Mercado (Market).

Alas, I ain’t proud of the fact that some of my companions wanted me to negotiate their purchases in the barter atmosphere of this collection of stalls.  Yeah, nice to be thought of as having the gift of gab, but then too there is the recognition that I would be uncompromising in an atmosphere where poor vendors are cutting pretty close to the bone to sell their wares.  How do you tell a landscape painter with huge talent and marginal circumstances that he is worth half of what he’s asking when he’s just come down a third?  But I did that and worse.  I should have just nodded and walked away, leaving him his dignity.  To be fair to myself, I took a break from the hard dealing, wandering behind the scenes to a loft where I discovered painters cranking out canvases and a Zen pot thrower in an off-shoulder robe spinning his clay at warp speed.  I resisted offering up my cement-encrusted work shoes as a joke to a shoe shiner, realizing he might actually try to polish them.  But there were no twinges of conscience holding me back when I got to the final stall and asked for postcards.  A child shouted to a woman, who called to a man, who ran off to acquire the sought for merchandise while everyone held up their hands in a communal plea for me to wait.

I waited.  And when the man returned puffing and glistening with exertion, I low-balled his modest price for a few postcards.  Yes, I did that, but believe me it was pure reflex.  When I realized what I was doing, I deliberately overpaid him – not with rounded up bills but in coins.  And that was my real sin.  Because he saw through it.  He knew that I expected he would say nothing and keep the extra change.  How patronizing of me, how cynical and condescending.  I, who believe in human excellence, in motivating people to fulfill the highest expectations possible, had slipped into the crippling philosophy of misguided charity that I detest.  More to the point, I had reduced him to a stereotype that must have been lurking in the laziest part of my mind.  You RESPECT people by holding them to account for what you should respect them for, not by underestimating them.  What a thin price I put on his integrity.  It is an old lesson I should have remembered, namely what I wrote above about limiting people to fit your expectations.  I took the change, but I will be a long time forgetting the indignation in his eyes…

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the September Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  The July and August Sullygrams have cool pictures from the Dominican as well as full accounts [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/   and http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/08/16/thomas-sullivan-a-red-shirt-molasses-in-a-feathered-world-the-other-side-of-the-wall/  ].   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “Trying to undo who you have become is like trying to make a warped record flat again by pressing it under an encyclopedia.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

“Don’t worry.  I forgot your name too.”  That’s what my red T-shirt proclaims.  I don’t wear it to be funny.  I wear it out of fear.  Names zip into and out of my ears like grease through a goose.  I’m dense as a box of rocks when it comes to retaining that most basic of labels.  Given that I’ve mingled in mobs most of my life, this is a major problem.  I use the term “mobs” lovingly – referring to coaching, teaching, a stint as city commissioner, writing & public speaking, and just generally rolling along like a drop of misplaced molasses in a feathered world.  Used to beat up on myself over my inability to remember names.  Sheer arrogance, I thought.  Which is what the nameless victims of my selective amnesia had a right to feel about me.  But I’ve come to believe it is anything but arrogance.  Moreover, I think it underlies a critical author skill.

Mmm.   Skill.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  Okay, an author focus.  But critical.  Definitely that.  Because the reason I don’t catch names is that I am intensely focused on whatever is coming at me below the verbal level.  When I first meet someone my attention is like an iceberg, 7/8ths beneath the surface of what they are saying.  I will notice minute psychological details, mannerisms, gestures, expressions, verbal clues behind spoken words — tone, repetitions, hesitations, any pattern — the choices the person makes as indicated by their appearance, where their attention drifts, their responses, fears, wants, ad infinitum.  I am overwhelmed with information to process.  But I am unlikely to remember their name.  Whether I do the below-ground noticing with any particular insight, or even accurately, does not really matter, I suppose, as far as being an author.  The relevant thing is that I am engaged in perceiving people, and whether I’m spot-on in what I see or simply inventing stuff it all goes into the bit bucket of my imagination and mental filing cabinet for new characters.

It does matter, however, that I do this without being threatening or judgmental.  After all, if I’m going to learn anything, I need to be trusted and accepted as capable of understanding.  Moreover, what I personally want is to know truth.  In human relations it is very hard not to unconsciously cue people as to what you want or expect.  And so we end up with anything but truth, namely lip service, false testimonials, and illusions presented to us by those with whom we interact.  The deepest human passions and the darkest secrets reveal themselves best when they come at you without being bidden in any way.  Create an expectation for them and you will likely get what you wanted rather than truth.  So dialing back on your persuasiveness and repressing your subtle expectations as best you can makes learning truths possible.  Authors need to have that objective mode, if only so they can give back truth in their writings.  

Permit me to double down here.  Last month I received a large amount of e-mail pertaining to that column about my stay in a Dominican slum (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/  ).  I promised to follow through with more info about that, and I’ll do it here by way of illustrating the above points – it was a time of truth-gathering for me. 

Poverty wracked Villa Esfuerzo, where people may sit ankle-deep in water in their one-room shotgun shacks as slashing rains come through, has its outposts of security behind razor wire and iron bars.  There was a wall and iron bars around where we slept.  Beyond the wall roosters crowed all night and local children gathered in silent packs to watch us through the bars as we talked of profound things or sang the evenings away.  This mute audience bothered me greatly.  Children shout, children move and make noise, children laugh.  Not these.  They stood barefoot in their worn shirts and shorts and watched and watched and watched in total stillness as we moved and laughed.  They stood as if they were watching an irresistible movie.  It haunted me.  It still haunts me.  The first time I saw them I was reminded of a home-made movie I saw years ago taken of some stone-age hunters in Borneo who had never visited civilization but were taken to a modern airport where they stood in silence outside a chain link fence watching giant airplanes land and take-off.  During WWII these same hunters had aided marines who had come in planes and given them chocolate.  When the war ended the natives built a crude narrow runway and erected a model plane lure and lit the sides of the runway with torches at night while they watched the skies for a return.  They watched and waited for decades.  And here they stood in their feathered finery and fierce face paint, looking very small before the soaring airliners on the other side of the chain link.  What were they thinking?  What did these children here now in the Dominican think?   

Every night that they came I went to the iron bars and in broken Spanish tried to talk to them.  I asked them their names.  And, of course, I don’t remember any of them.  Well…one.  I remember one.  Juanita.  All the same I was searching for answers, for clues as to what they felt and how they would remember our presence in their world and what that might tell them about the rest of the planet.  My concentration was as fierce as the Borneo hunters’ faces, but I could glean nothing.  Nada.  They watched expressionlessly through the bars or smiled shyly when I talked to them — the older boys hanging back a little warily — and that was it.  Not a clue.  They came each night by climbing a second stone wall into a kind of garden that I had jokingly dubbed “the tarantula badlands” because we had hunted down the giant hairy spiders there one night.  They seemed so transitory – these watchers.  Impossible in eternity.  I wanted to open those gates and bring them in.  Did they sense that?  Have they forgiven me for not finding a way to include them?  Ah, vanity.  I want to be forgiven.  That’s the kind of liberal guilt I can’t stand.  Love is what you give, not what you get.

Lots more to tell, but no space to tell it.  Well.  Actually I’ve been saying it a lot lately face to face with people.  So, I’ll tell you what.  If there’s enough interest in this, as there was last month, I’ll go one more column with something else from the Dominican adventure.  Maybe that’s how I’ll take some of the bars down and exorcise my vanity of conscience.

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the August Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you along with July’s Dominican photos.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “I wish I didn’t know all the things that have been lost or thrown away, and I wish I could forget the time wasted in the wrong life.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again.  Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism.  The best things are like that.  Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral.  It’s their nonconformist free nature.  After all, how can you define magic?  If you could, it wouldn’t be magic.  And writers depend on magic.

Want to borrow some?

I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7.  People magic.  Nature magic.  And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day.  Here.  Take my place.  Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive.  This is your first religious experience.  Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive.  And a hundred others like him.  But before that, gaze hard out the window.  Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people.  70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty.  Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water. 

Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.

See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg.  See the razor wire on the church school where you are working.  Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels.  Angels everywhere.

The people are not time oriented here.  They are event oriented.  And you are an event.  Even though they have seen you before.  You came and went.  Thousands of times.  So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women.  Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects.  Yeah, you can sneer at that.  But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby.  I do not know why there were four more in quick succession.  You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what?  Stop escaping?  Hey, what do I know?  But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over.  Driving is, in fact, creative.  A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.

But there is great love here.  Huge love.  You see it in the children first.  They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook.  They want so desperately to be held and hugged.  I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg.  Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age.  Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge.  Quite unforgettable.

Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly.  One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness.  And these are not uninformed people.  They get it.  Who they are, who you are.  Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride.  When you own nothing, nothing owns you.  So go ahead.  Walk through the winding streets.  Accept one of the invitations to come inside.  Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea.  Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school.  Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original?  The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers.  They throw nothing away.  Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry.  A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks.  When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children.  The kids are so often sick…

I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know.  It happens like this.  You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food.  They form a circle and start clapping.  Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement.  Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours.  Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you.  The more outrageous your signature moves the better.  Walls.  You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down.   It happens differently with the men.  The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.”  To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus.  It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop.  Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten.  Music.  The universal language.

But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon.  Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart.  Keyboard, drum kit, guitar.  Interpretive dancers.  My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that!  I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video.  Not gonna happen.  It’s gone now.  Some things are too perfect for anything but memory.  When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them.  You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins.  You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people.  You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges.  Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared.  Doesn’t matter.  We didn’t have to say anything.  Those people knew.

Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there.  But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you?  Easy to discover in the Dominican.  Tougher in your own backyard.  But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column).  There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan