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| The
Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central
Ohio. |
Father Zorro and the
Statisticians Crop and Livestock Reporting shared the eighth floor of an office building with the Selective Service Administration. The war was over, the draft had ended, and the office was almost desolate, staffed only by a morose Army lieutenant and two secretaries who never seemed to have much to do. Most of the eighth floor was taken up by a vast empty room where draftees had undergone their pre-induction physicals during the Vietnam War. Now it was a big empty space going to waste. So the statisticians nailed a basketball hoop on the west wall and spent at least one coffee break a day in an impromptu game.
I used the camaraderie of the game to ask them for a favor. I wanted to try my hand at writing about crops and livestock. Would anyone let me write a report or two for them? Ed declined, but a few of the others agreed. The arrangement was mutually beneficial. They got more time for other projects, and I got a chance to learn a new skill from professionals who mentored me while checking and editing my work. I began to understand what Ed told me: Nothing is better than writing about crops. Peaches, tomatoes, peanuts, yellow squash, okra, strawberries, cabbages, corn, rye and potatoes. This was clean, healthy, wholesome writing -- much better than the existentialist despair and literary navel-gazing I'd studied in college. Our office building was a few blocks north of downtown, in what used to be a neighborhood of graceful mansions that had long since been razed and replaced with gas stations and low income apartments. Every morning I walked to work along Sayre Street, named after the old prestigious family of Zelda Sayre, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A few ramshackle shells of the street's former glory remained, but it had turned into a bad neighborhood where enterprising thieves popped the hoods of parked cars and stole their batteries by day. I always thought of Scott Fitzgerald when I took Sayre Street. He must have sometimes walked on this same sidewalk I now took, back in the days when he was courting Zelda in her family's great house on Pleasant Avenue. I wondered what might have happened if This Side of Paradise had turned out to be a flop after all. Would Scott Fitzgerald have returned and settled in Montgomery with his young bride, maybe found a job with the Crop and Livestock Reporting Service, and had a happier life writing about agriculture?
These were dangerous thoughts. The romance of agriculture was distracting me from my master plan to escape from Montgomery as soon as possible, by makeshift tunnel under the Alabama River if necessary. Fortunately, the statisticians were about to break the spell I'd fallen under. So far, I'd written only about crops. The time had come for the slaughter of lambs, pigs, chickens, and other creatures great and small. Plants are better than animals. Or at least cleaner. With plants, life is about growing, sprouting, blossoming, burgeoning, pollinating, bearing fruit, and waving about in the summer wind. Even their death and decomposition is picturesque. But any animal's life is messy, and its death is carnage. This truth struck me the day that one of the statisticians presented me with a sheaf of receipts from a slaughterhouse. It was time for the beef cattle report. The thick bundles of receipts that piled up on my desk were stuck together with crusts of dried blood and mucous. Each slip of paper that I read listed at least one deformity or disease the poor animal was suffering from even as it was forced down the chute to its execution. The livestock reports snapped me out of my bucolic fantasy and revived my existentialist view of a life that's absurd, as well as nasty, brutish and short. Fitzgerald wouldn't have been happier doing this, I decided. Next: Love the roaches |