Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Read online




  HONEYMOONERS

  A Cautionary Tale

  Chuck Kinder

  Published by Chuck Kinder at Smashwords.

  Copyright 2014 by Chuck Kinder.

  Smashwords edition, License notes.

  A new edition with an introduction by Jay Mclnemey

  and including The Lost Chapters & The Lost Love Letters.

  Previously published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh 2009, First Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries Edition.

  Honeymooners was first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2001.

  The author wishes to express his gratitude to Jay Mclnerney for his permission to reprint the Introduction.

  The author wishes to thank Tom Moran for the artwork on the cover.

  This book goes out for

  my old coach

  Richard Scowcroft

  &

  Diane, always Diane

  Contents

  The Lost Chapters & The Lost Love Letters Introduction:

  Please Say Who This Book Is About, Please

  A novel (or a memoir?) by a writer (who inspired a movie character) about another writer (aka Raymond Carver). Got it?

  Blue Brontosaurus

  Sperm Count

  The Seven Warning Signs of Love

  Secret Sons

  The Wife in the Story

  You Are Not Your Characters

  Celestial Navigation

  People of the Wolf

  The Garden City of the Northwest

  Black Widow

  White Men in the Tropics

  One-Whore Town

  Sacred Cows

  Brand-New Life

  Killer Is Cool

  The Shadow in the Open Door of the Future

  Sisters from a Past Life

  White Meat

  Ancient Eggs

  All Wet

  The Last Straw

  No Shelter

  Out of the Blue

  Turkeys in the Rain

  Bald Boy

  Crying at Will

  The Kindness of Strangers

  Sea of Love

  The Lights of Buenos Aires

  Living for the Record

  Lucky Old Dog

  Lost Highways

  The Queen of California

  Vast Club

  Say Uncle

  Rock Bottom

  Target Practice

  Living Memory

  Lost Chapters and Lost Love Letters

  The Lost Chapters & The Lost Love Letters Introduction:

  Please Say Who This Book Is About, Please

  A novel (ora memoir?) by a writer (who inspired a movie character) about another writer (aka Raymond Carver). Got it?

  Chuck Kinder’s Honeymooners is a Rabelaisian buddy movie of a book that is either an old-fashioned roman a clef or a postmodern experiment in the blurring of fact and fiction. In tone, method and period it resembles nothing so much as Frederick Exley’s brilliant fictionalized autobiography, A Fans Notes.

  Once upon a time - as recently as the years covered by this tale of the post-Beat literary world - the legacy of New Criticism demanded that reviewers treat poems and novels as self contained vessels. But since then, literary commentary - at least the kind in our racier general-interest periodicals - has evolved to a stage where gossip about the author s life, his advance and his movie prospects is considered to be coextensive with the universe created by his words on the page. Not so coincidentally, during the 90’s the memoir seemed poised to annihilate the novel as a genre. While Kinder’s publishers have, admirably, refrained from exploiting the lit-gossip aspects of this book - except to call it “long-awaited” – it’s difficult to ignore them. Indeed Kinder leaves the door between fiction and memoir wide open. Let me explain.

  It’s undoubtedly possible to read this book without knowing that Kinder was a close friend of Raymond Carver. But many of those who pick up this volume about two bad-boy American writers in the making will recognize the general outline of Carver s life, as well as the plots of fiction written by the late master of the American story. Anyone who knew Carver will be continually delighted and horrified at Kinder’s eerie resurrection of the man, who’s called Ralph Crawford here (Jackie Gleasons Ralph Kramden being the other archetype). At one point Crawford tells his friend Jim Stark, who is loosely based on Kinder himself, “Will you please pass that joint, please,” echoing Carvers most famous title as well as his distinctive manner of speech. So little does Kinder wish to disguise his sources he even attributes well-known Carver short stories to Crawford.

  To add to the confusion, Kinder, who teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and has published two previous novels - Snakehunter (1973) and The Silver Ghost (1978) - has been reported to be the model for Grady Tripp, the blocked writer in Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (1995), the man played by Michael Douglas in the recent movie version. Honeymooners had, by Kinder’s own account, a more than 25-year gestation. The book once ran to more than 3,000 manuscript pages; it now appears at roughly one-tenth that size.

  With this background in mind, I commend Honeymooners to nearly everyone except possibly the parents of young men with literary ambitions. Like the candy mint that is also a breath mint, it can be enjoyed as either a novel or a memoir. Or, if you prefer, as a metafictional object. Whatever. If Honeymooners doesn’t make you laugh, cry and cringe with sympathetic embarrassment, then you should probably adjust your medication immediately.

  Honeymooners is set in the Bay Area, post-Haight-Ashbury, where Stark and Crawford have landed as graduate writing fellows at Stanford University. Jim has already published a novel about his hardscrabble childhood in West Virginia; Ralph, whose origins are equally humble, is just starting to make a name for himself in the literary world with his short stories, even as his personal life slides into a chaos of debt and alcoholism. Ralph is having a torrid affair with a young woman from Montana whom Jim, engaged as a go-between, eventually woos and weds for himself.

  Ralph is married to the flamboyant Alice Ann, his childhood sweetheart, who abets both his writing ambitions and the profligate, self-destructive behavior that will eventually destroy their marriage. Like the couple in Carvers story What Is It? the Crawfords are forced to declare bankruptcy; Ralph writes a story about his wife selling the family car the day before the court hearing. In between the hair-raising binges, Ralph dries out at an institution, as does the protagonist of Carver s “Where I’m Calling From.” The Crawfords have two unnamed teenagers, referred to by Ralph as “those criminal, thieving kids.” Theirs is a squalid love story in many ways, but as portrayed by Kinder, it ultimately has a tragic grandeur. In the end even the most skeptical reader is almost inclined to credit Alice Ann s hippie-dippy notion that she and Ralph have been together through dozens of lifetimes. It feels as if several are portrayed here.

  Characters named John Cheever, Ken Kesey, S. Clay Wilson - even Cynthia Ozick! - wander through these pages: one of the funniest scenes involves a bibulous dinner with Cheever in Iowa City. Ralph, the worshipful young writing student, invites Cheever out to dinner, only to have his credit card returned to him in pieces; years later, as they plan to walk out on the check in another restaurant, that is the only detail of the dinner upon which Ralph and Alice Ann can agree.

  Anyone looking for insights into the process of creation will be disappointed; it’s a mystery how and when Crawford or Stark finds the time or the energy to write between parties and hangovers. But for all the addled wit and hairy masculinity of his main characters, Kinder’s prose has the range to encompass the tenderness of romantic love and the longing for the infinite that haunts these men. Some of the most effective passage
s reflect the point of view of the women doomed to love these literary outlaws - although at times the transitions between moments of farce and wistful romance can be jarring. One sometimes senses the palimpsest layers of multiple drafts.

  Like Carver, Kinder creates a kind of poetry out of the cliches of everyday American usage and hackneyed figures of speech (I suspect this was a shared language). Water is always going over the dam or under the bridge. Dozens of geese are cooked. Nails are hit repeatedly on the head. Crawford, especially, attempts to impose some kind of order on the chaos of his life with an endless string of cliches - a habit Stark lampoons in a speech at yet another drunken party, ostensibly celebrating the acceptance of his latest novel.

  “He wanted to take this opportunity, Jim said, to thank old Running Dog Ralph Crawford for all the little words of encouragement Ralph had given him during those dark, discouraging days Jim was struggling to complete his new novel, soon to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Stay the course, Ralph had suggested to Jim when Jim was feeling defeated. Never say die, Ralph had recommended. All's well that ends well. The end justifies the means. It’s not over until the fat lady sings.... In many ways Jim had old Ralph to thank for the big-bucks sale of his new novel soon to be published by “Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.”

  Ralph and Alice Ann finally part ways; Ralph eventually remarries; he and Jim stay in touch even as geography and Ralph’s growing fame come between them. Stark - with his Montana sweetheart - drifts into the kind of becalmed middle age he tried so strenuously to avoid; given his previous behavior, survival itself seems like a triumph. The two friends hook up for a last nostalgic road trip together, setting out from San Francisco, scene of former triumphs and debacles, where Ralph reads to a large crowd a story about Chekhov’s death, which was to be the last story he ever wrote.

  Which brings us back to Carver. On one level this book is a kind of gonzo eulogy for a great American writer. While it depicts a more innocent era of literary enterprise, its mixed modes of fiction and memoir seem strangely appropriate to our own self-conscious cultural landscape.

  —Jay Mclnerney

  Blue Brontosaurus

  Ralph and Alice Ann had been mere kids and mostly innocent of any adult sense of dire consequences when they first met, fell head over heels in love, and married, using the pressures of pregnancy only as an excuse.

  Ralph was eighteen, fresh out of high school, and working in a sawmill to save college money, when one summer evening, after an afternoon of driving around drinking beer, he and some pals pulled into a thunderbeast theme park on a whim. They sat there for a time in the gravel parking lot in Ralph’s old rattletrap Ford polishing off their beers and lying about babes. Ralph sipped his suds and stared up at the blue face of a brontosaurus looming above the trees like some strange, low moon with unfathomable yellow eyes.

  Ralph and his pals lurched along the park’s gravel paths among plants and trees strangely tropical for the Northwest and totally unknown to Ralph. Ralph picked leaves shaped like birds or bats in flight, and he sniffed them and held them up in the evening light. Ralph and his pals climbed great blue backs, swung from blue necks, took leaks on legs like blue tree trunks. Playing monster movie, Ralph and his pals split up, stumbling among the narrow paths grunting like goofy Godzillas.

  Deep into the park, Ralph rounded a bend in a gravel path to discover the most beautiful blond girl he had seen in his life. She stood in a small clearing, hosing down a dinosaur, the dusk a haze of light about her as she sprayed prismatic mists of water over the beast’s blue back. She wore red short-shorts and a white halter top, and the ends of her long blond hair were darkened with water. Her tanned shoulders and long legs were wet and shining. The leaves of the trees and bushes about the clearing dripped, and water dripped from beneath the blue dinosaur, and the air smelled as rich as any rain in Ralph’s memory. Ralph could hear the soft hiss of the hose and from somewhere in the tropical trees around him muffled laughter, as though from another life. Small, bright rainbows glistened over the blue beast, and through the glowing bell of mist and light the girl’s long, lovely, tan face floated before Ralph, and the air captured in his chest was like an ancient caged breath. Ralph could imagine this beast the girl watered moving off in the next moments under the dripping trees to disappear.

  When Alice Ann was ten her mother died after a stroke, and Alice Ann hated her for doing it, for leaving her like that, leaving Alice Ann and her half sister, Erin, to live with Alice Ann’s crummy stepdaddy in his hot, cramped trailer at the edge of her step- daddy’s dinosaur park.

  Alice Ann would grow more and more to look like her mother, tall and slender, with small, delicate breasts, boyish hips, that cascade of blond hair, even the voice, deep without resonance, a voice screaming would destroy for hours.

  One afternoon soon after the memorial service, Alice Ann’s crummy stepdaddy picked Alice Ann and Erin up after school. Lookit in the backseat, he told them. Your momma’s riding in the backseat, he said, and snickered. Alice Ann looked in the backseat, where she saw a silvery canister with her mother’s name and dates of birth and death etched on its shiny side.

  Alice Ann thought Ralph looked like a young Abraham Lincoln. Ralph was the smartest boy she had ever met. Ralph wrote poems and he had big plans in which that sawmill played no part. Ralph had dark brown eyes that widened and flashed when he talked about a future to be fished like shining, deep water. The first time Ralph kissed her, Alice Ann thought about how fateful it felt, the way their bodies, both tall and lean, seemed to fit like pieces of a puzzle, bone against soft place, convex against concave, the perfection of dark hairs on the back of Ralph’s huge, gende hands as they caressed Alice Ann’s small blond breasts. Alice Ann’s stepdaddy hated the sight of Ralph.

  Late one summer night, a month after they met, Alice Ann and Ralph made love for the first time in the darkness beneath the blue brontosaurus. When Ralph opened his eyes finally, he said, Holy moly, I’m in love. Alice Ann did not move. A faint breath in her throat told Ralph that she knew what he meant. Ralph had been a virgin. When Alice Ann skipped her period, Ralph bought her a tiny diamond ring. Years later, when Alice Ann finally broke down and told Ralph who had done it to her before him, Ralph told Alice Ann it no longer really ate his heart out that she hadn’t been a virgin, too. Besides, her rotten, lowlife stepdaddy was by that time dead as a doornail.

  When they were first married, Ralph and Alice Ann did not have the proverbial pot to pee in, so they could not set sail like some lucky honeymooners to exotic spots to launch their life together. Forget any thoughts of Hawaii, Niagara Falls, any Caribbean cruise under a yellow, tropical moon and countless stars to romantic ports of call, forget Disneyland. No, Ralph and Alice Ann had to launch their life together at the Dixie Court Cabins and Trailer Park at the southern edge of town. Their cabin had a tiny black-and-white TV set which worked well enough, though, and there was a tiny swimming pool out front, and down the road there was a discount liquor store with an adjoining lounge, and they had enough money for two nights alone before they would move into the small back bedroom of Ralph’s mom’s trailer.

  On their second and last evening there, Ralph had splurged on a bottle of high-class Scotch, and as he walked back to the cabins from the liquor store, he had felt enormously happy. He was looking forward to another long night of abandoned love- making. Abandoned, a word he liked the sound and taste of and said over and over to himself, rolling it over his tongue like a cherry-flavored LifeSaver; abandoned, the only word to describe what it had been like, throwing caution to the wind, and good manners, making all the noise they wanted, making juicy sounds during sex that were, well, so abandoned they were downright animal. Alice Ann, Ralph had gasped at one point while they were taking a breather, this business sure is, you know, abandoned. Alice Ann, Ralph had said, let’s always be abandoned.

  As the Dixie Court came into view, Ralph saw that Alice Ann was standing beside the little pool in front. She was wearing he
r new red bikini and she was wrapping her wet hair into a white towel. The early-evening light seemed to shine off her beautiful brown skin, and Ralph felt a flutter in his stomach. There she was, he thought with pride and wonder and lust, his new wife, his bride, the new Mrs. Crawford. Alice Ann was motionless except for her lifted slender arms and her hands folding her hair into that towel. It seemed to Ralph that even from this distance he could catch the scent of her flesh. She was standing slightly on tiptoe, so that the sleek muscles of her long, tanned legs were flexed and lovely-looking. Ralph felt his weenie wiggle.

  Alice Ann seemed to be staring at something in the distance, something in the line of pine trees at the darkening edge of the woods maybe. Ralph looked past her, in the direction of her intent gaze, but he couldn’t see a thing of interest. When he looked back at her, he noticed for the first time that the two men who were staying in the cabin next to theirs were sitting out front in metal lawn chairs. These men were on a fishing trip, and Ralph and Alice Ann had spoken with them briefly the night before and then again this morning, when they had run into each other at breakfast in the little diner down the road. Ralph had given them a tip about a spot he knew on a nearby creek good for brown trout, and then he and Alice Ann had chowed down on a breakfast of a half-dozen pancakes and three over-easy eggs with extra bacon each, before they had raced back to their cabin to make lots more abandoned love, their fingers and mouths still sweet and sticky with maple syrup.