Human Beings
For the moment this page serves as a placeholder for Human Beings, which was my first major writing effort. It was a roman à clef set in a dilapidated, back-alley neighborhood that I stumbled into on a late-summer night so long ago. I stayed for twelve years. Here was a never-ending cast of offbeat oddballs, miscreants, saints, and reprobates. And, of course, there was a tragic romance. This is surely not an original concept, and some big chunks of the writing are downright embarrassing, so shortly after Human Beings was finished I put it on the shelf. And there it has languished for more than thirty years. Yet it contains some solid story-lines as well as a pile of fabulous characters, so this upcoming summer I hope to revitalize this project. Any success probably depends on whether I can find a case or two of Richard’s Triple Peach.
The tale begins thusly:
"This is the story of my life among the Human Beings. I first encountered them years ago in an overgrown, ramshackle neighborhood slowly collapsing into a Southern night beneath an awkward moon."
Three hundred and twenty pages later, the tale ends thusly:
"Sometimes on dark, orphan nights I lay in bed as the lightning rolls and I remember that street-lit alley like it was the very first time. Once again, I wander those well-worn paths through the overgrown backyards, with kitchen-light spilling from screen doors ajar. The wind is in the honeysuckle... The backyard sauna is crankin’ and Triple Peach is in the freezer… Thunderstorms on the front porch in the evening... Catfights in the still of the night.
"It was a handmade world with all the players: the beauty, the gossip, the cynic the lovers, the lost soul, the floozy, the thief, the temptress, the troubadour, the wanderer — a ragamuffin pageant of artists and assholes, dreamers and fools, geniuses and losers — drunkards by the dozen, curly headed children of the crooked road with each their separate dreams crisscrossing on those aimless paths in the night.
"I think back on these souls like flowering weeds before the winter wind scatters their seeds. But why say more? For who shall ever tell the sorrow of standing on this frozen rock, staring at a bone-white moon, dreaming of the lost garden? Gods that faltered. Wingless angels. Human Beings."
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