Taking a Novel Break as History Marches On By

I’m back. Yeah, baby, I’m back. I’m gonna sing the blues. And maybe ball the jack.

I’m back. Me and Fast Eddie Felsen and Alexander Dubcek and John Travolta and bad pennies and the flip and monogamy (serial or plain) and democracy. Back.

Three things happened while I was gone.

I wrote a novel. Well, the first draft of one. Not a real novel like real novelists write, but an unreal novel about novel reality. As a child of the Midwest, I took great offense at people who asked me what I did on my “vacation.” How dare anyone assume I would take a vacation.

It was a strange, reclusive life--waking up every morning and forcing myself to dream.

I also forced myself to jog just to remember I had some kind of physical existence in some kind of real world. My kids would come home from school and kick me into the world. “There’s nothing to eat in this house.” You see, fruit, vegetables, bread and milk are food groups, not food.

I bravely wrote on, despite the constant vision of my book jacket blurbs: “Shockingly banal! . . . Deep down inside, she’s shallow . . . The insight of a 3-year-old . . . “ You try getting anything done with friends like these in your own head.

Then, there was an earthquake in Northern California. I was there. Me and my little girl (who is now 15 and bigger than me) were about to watch the World Series on TV. I don’t remember this, but she claims that when the room turned into a Tilt-a-Whirl, I threw myself on top of her. She managed to get her head out from under me and look at the big glass window next to us and calmly say, “Shouldn’t we get under a table?”

The power went out for 20 hours, and a big red moon rose. I was forcibly ejected from my computer. We drove around looking for damage but couldn’t find any. We avoided the three spots where really bad things happened. We saw those on the TV over and over and over. A wise man made a T-shirt that said, “I Survived the Media Coverage of the Earthquake.”

Everyone I ever knew back East called to see if we were OK. And on a day when girl gangs were randomly sticking pins in women in New York, someone from there called and said, “But aren’t you afraid to live in California?”

Funny California things happened. There were tiny tidal waves in swimming pools and mini-tsunamis in hot tubs. An endless cavalcade of shrinks appeared on TV to talk about Surviving Emotional Aftershocks. Aroma therapists volunteered to help victims. I know if my house collapsed, I’d want a good whiff of Wild Musk.

A noted Freudian scholar told me he thought the earthquake was an “internal event.” When the crowds in the library dove under the tables, he said, his first thought was: “They can really sense my anger.”

Finally, there was a big telethon for earthquake relief. People paid a million dollars to get the demented image of Neil Young off the screen.

The third thing that happened while I was gone was that the people of Eastern Europe rose up. Each week we were treated to another country demanding freedom. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Poland.

It had to be the most touching sight on live TV since the days of the civil rights movement. A Czech leader spoke at a rally, and he said, “We need people of the highest knowledge and morality to lead the new democracy.” Could he possibly be thinking of the same democracy that brought us Bush, Quayle and the famous Teddy K?

Through it all, I kept picturing a lounge singer in a dingy joint on the Baltic coast slithering to the microphone, loosening his tie and saying, “Franz Kafka, baby, this one’s for you,” as he burst into a medley of “Danke Schoen,” “Born Free” and “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”

To recap: In an historic time, in the midst of a terrifying earthquake, I wrote a novel of insignificant proportions. It’s a free country.