Last Exit

We look at the menu, but it’s only a formality.  We already know what we’re up against:  a Siren of a thing this restaurant calls ‘Love Boat,’ which is a collection of sushi-and-sashimi-for-two the three of us have never been able to resist—and so, we’re not about to now.

We chat, just like old times, and the two of you occasionally squabble.  Normal for siblings, I think.  And I’m quietly thankful for the familiarity—which still has the nice ring of ‘family,’ even if the rip tide of ‘concept’ is moving steadily, irrevocably, out to sea.  I feel myself drifting with it, but trying to hold fast to pylons for the duration.

‘Love Boat’ finally arrives, and we dig in.  Eager mouths attach to this love-in-a-boat, and the earlier testiness disappears from the table.  My two babies are now just taking on fuel against a cold February night.  I love their greediness, which is a father’s delight to be able to satisfy.

But my delight is on a clock, and that clock has now ticked out.

We conclude with Green Tea and Red Bean ice cream:  exotica beyond mere flavors or colors in this frigid time of year.  I ask for the check, lay down a cool hundred—my last for the privilege of a ‘Love Boat’—and we stand up to leave.

“You’re going straight home?” my little guy asks.  I lie, tell him “yes.”  We walk two blocks to their front gate, and his sister, my daughter, says “g’nite.”  He knows, however, that an entrance to the park is just another block away and insists on walking me to the subway stop.  It’s a park, he knows, in which one can easily lose oneself on a winter’s night—a park asleep, a park apart, a park of no necessary exit.  There was a time, he knows, when I walked–sometimes slept–there late at night, quite apart, looking perhaps for a last, fast exit.

We walk to the subway stop.  He waits at the top, I imagine, until he’s heard “goodnight” from me and a click from the turnstile—until he knows I’m going home.

“I’ll call you,” is the last thing I hear from him, and I know he means it.  This is his watch, and he’ll want to verify that I’ve gone nowhere else, not to any last exit, nowhere but home—at least tonight.

Three hours later, a fine dinner tumbling in my belly while a cognac and coffee wait within easy reach, I sit in perfect contentment on a loveseat in front of a blazing fire in a cavernous room of a fine hotel.  This loveseat—like its twin just opposite me—is set at a ninety-degree angle to the fire, and I turn my head to look across the room and out the floor-to-ceiling windows at curtain call upon curtain call of large, billowy snowflakes—and then re-focus on the pitch black emptiness just out of range of the hotel’s lights.  The flames of the fire in front of me, I note with some relish, reflect ghoulishly off the windowpanes—orange specters dancing for my perusal and with no other care in the world but that I should be entertained.

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I put on my hiking boots, get some advice and a map from Meredith at the front desk, and set out into the woods.  The path—an old carriage road—is quite clearly marked for most of the way.  Lack of observation or adequate light might get you easily lost—at which point there’s no telling where you’d end up—but the trail is a well-trodden one, and a bit of attention to others’ boot-prints leaves you in little doubt about your destination.  Well over an hour later, I see a sign telling me I’m still .7 mile away from the lake, and I realize this hike represents something more than a comfy Sunday stroll.  I may have to embellish a tad with Angie—not exactly a sportswoman from what I’ve seen—but the end will most assuredly justify the means.

My first view of water is no less stupefying than my first sight of the Redwoods and Sequoias as we entered the park.  And yet, my sighting of what I believe to be the lake is in error; the spot I want is still a quarter of a mile off.  I move on—and in the meanwhile, gaze occasionally up at what my map tells me are Mt. Watkins, Ahwiyah Point and Half Dome.  The names have all the poetry of lentil soup, but the view can’t be denied.  I wonder only how it is that Christian missionaries didn’t immediately throw down their crosses and go native when they first stood where I’m now standing.

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Not even two weeks later, I’m sitting next to Angie as we begin our decent into San Francisco’s international airport.  She snores like a marmot, her head wedged in between the headrest and the window and about as far away from mine as she could possibly have put it.  I might, of course, take advantage—but I’m no dentist; which is to say, I like mine alive, alert, fully conscious.  Still, I can appreciate skylines as much as the next guy, and San Francisco’s got a good one.  I lean over Angie to look out the window, but get bogged down in the scenery most immediately below.  My-oh-my… buttons have been popped in the eagerness, I suppose, of firm young lungs to breathe some California air.  The view is breath-taking—yet not so overwhelming that I fail to notice once again her honeyed scent.  The smell—dare I say?—is divine.

Click here to read chapter two.

There’s my “career,” Daniel, and then there’s my career.  The first is what enables me to do the second.  It allows me to pay the rent, keep the fridge half-full, raise my kids in something other than poverty and, when I’m not overwhelmed by these day-to-day challenges, to write.

Writing is a privilege.  I don’t for an instant believe that anything I write will make one gnat’s breath worth of difference in the world, and I occasionally regret the expenditure of paper and ink (or at least digits) in exercising this privilege.

But I’m thoroughly convinced that all of us have a need to do something more than survive.  When I was still a young student (in Vienna, Austria at the time), a professor asked me whether I was going in search of fame and fortune.  I told him no, I had no desire for fame and fortune; what I wanted—I modestly appended—was immortality.

Many of us achieve a brush with immortality in our children.  If I accomplish nothing else in my own life, I can honestly say that I’ve had a small part in raising two of the most extraordinary people I know: a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Alexandra.  The first is an aspiring writer; the second is an aspiring dancer.  Their talents and aspirations aside, they’re both genuinely considerate, loving, sensitive and likable individuals.  That I, as a parent, love them is a given; that I also like them is not.

I like them.

FARAWAY: How did you first know that you wanted to write?

I’ve known since I first entered college as a pre-med major (Davidson College, in Davidson, NC) in 1969 that I wanted to write.  I puttered around with some poetry at the time, the object of which was some poor girl up the way and over the mountain in Bristol, TN.  Mostly, however, I read.

1968 – 1969, however, was a troubled and troubling time.  I left Davidson after a year, moved around a bit for almost two years trying to make some sense of my life, then went to Europe with the idea of getting an education on my own terms.  The eight-year plan was both straightforward and naïve:  I’d live in four countries for two years each, learn the language, the culture and the literature of each.  I ended up living in five, including a summer in the then-Soviet Union, and learned five languages.

By the time I returned to the U.S., I’d learned at least enough to know I’d have to get a college degree—and so, I enrolled in Columbia University here in NYC.  One of the things I obviously hadn’t acquired in Europe was wisdom; I enrolled as a philosophy major.  However, I also knew I’d have to work one day to support my habit.  I minored in Russian and studied a sixth language, Swedish.

I graduated from Columbia in three years as clueless as I’d gone in—which is a pretty dangerous state to be in at the age of 33.  I stumbled into a secretarial job with a high tech company because, thank God, I’d learned how to type 65 wpm in high school.  Some of my jobbing in Europe had included teaching English as a second language—and so, I also had a pretty good idea of grammar, syntax and spelling.

It wasn’t long before I realized that most of the glory and money in the business world nested in sales.  I had debts that would’ve tried Job.  I consequently moved into sales, where I’ve been ever since.

As my eldest sister has never tired of telling me, she knows no one less disposed to the sales profession than I am.  She’s right.  But I had some luck, and it was pretty damned easy to be successful at sales in the nineties.

Then, of course, came the dot.com bust.  At 50, and with a base salary that would’ve made a commander blush, I was suddenly out of a job—and without prospects for getting another one.  I turned, in 2002, to the only other thing I knew how to do—and yes, to the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do.

I got my first poem published in The American Dissident, and I thought I was on my way.  If not exactly to fame and fortune, at least to a way to make a living.  I continued to write poetry, most of which has been published either on the ‘Net or in print, including one Pushcart Prize nomination.

I wrote a four-act play that went nowhere.  To purge myself of the failure (in all respects of that little oeuvre) I started to write short stories.  I wrote the first one in seventy-two hours without a dictionary or reference book of any kind.  It eventually ended up in an anthology titled Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen.  (They may’ve been bound, but only in the editor’s head.)  That story, “Waltzing Matilda,” appears in the anthology you have kindly agreed to publish.

I wrote a second, “In the Animal Kingdom,” which also eventually earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.  It, too, appears in this anthology, Stories.

I eventually went on to write a novel, Trompe-l’œil, which, with an unhappy ending at 162K words and using eleven languages (in dialogue), understandably remains in neglected manuscript form—although the first chapter of it has been published once in print and once on the ‘Net.  Some other excerpts have also been published on the ‘Net.

Speaking of which, Internet publishing has been quite kind to me.  It hasn’t paid my rent—not by a long shot—but Googling to my name would suggest that I’ve done reasonably well in cyberspace.

If success is measured in more than coffee spoons, however, I frankly haven’t done well.  If I’m still alive today, it’s thanks to a woman who has, for all intents and purposes, kept me financially afloat for a couple of years now—and also to a supreme bit of serendipity in finding a job in the industry in which I’d worked for eighteen years, and which I began last December.  The man who hired me chose to overlook what most would not: my age (not to mention my seven years’ absence from the industry, during which it had evolved almost beyond recognition).  I intend not to let him down.  If this means that I spend less time writing, so be it.  Let others have their shot at grinding trees into pulp or the ether into digits.  I will—only because it’s the one writing thing I can do that doesn’t require long hours at a single sitting—continue to dabble in poetry.

To read samples of Russell’s poetry click here.  Be sure to return tomorrow for the first chapter of Something Special.

Return to FarawayJournal.com throughout the month to download new chapters of Something Special and to read other work by this talented author.

Friday, August 7: Introducing Russell Bittner

Saturday, August 8: Chapter 1, Something Special

Sunday, August 9: Chapter 2, Something Special

Tuesday, August 11: An Interview with Russell Bittner

Thursday, August 13: Chapter 3, Something Special

Saturday, August 15: Chapter 4, Something Special

Sunday, August 16: Chapter 5, Something Special

Tuesday, August 18: Chapter 6, Something Special

Friday, August 21: Publish or Perish

Sunday, August 23: In the Animal Kingdom

Tuesday, August 25: Last Exit

Friday, August 28: Aubrey Ference