Books are B-O-OK with me!

I'm going at ATL for a few days to say hi to mom and winn and derka's sr. and derka's jr, so i'll leave you with something to read. a story from my college days, a story about my favorite things, BOOKS!


Safe behind his closed door in the room of his familiar surroundings, unrushed by the appointments of daytime’s constant calling, Jerry finds himself struggling to be honest. The flicker of his ritual creative candle dances a dance so sprightly he doesn’t notice himself straying from the task at hand. But what is the task at hand he wonders? “Write that down” comes to mind, so he does.
His first taste of official attempts at writing poetry have left him even more deeply certain that there’s nothing that he’s certain he knows. The expanse of word play and the unavoidable gap between what written words mean to him verse what the same words mean to any one else has left him imbedded in a place he knows he must swim out of to find perspective. Introduction to Poetry 2392 opened Jerry’s floodgate, and his determination to create himself a buoyant raft, regardless of how long or strange it might take or be. If it floats on whatever he found himself paddling through, he felt it must be true. Of course, writing in terms of the creative, metaphorical world brought back the issue of the gap again between what he saw, felt and sensed as an individual set of eyes and what anybody else saw. More than that, he had an even harder time finding people who could even see one pair of eyes, in the physical world, only validates one mindset of ideas. There was no real way to know what’s going on in other people’s heads, as far as the ghost of science had decided so far.
Academics in a place like this seem commonplace to the outside observer because people can see what they want to see in his room. Not that he had other people’s opinions in mind when he was creating his living space, but maybe he did and didn’t know it. Feng Shui couldn’t be proven wrong so he figured why not put his own spin on keeping the flow and the energies he couldn’t see yet going? Parents weekend proved that to be true when Jerry and his roommates decided to throw a black tie affair for the parents. Of course, the irony that the kids used their parent’s money to throw them a party was overlooked because in a world where the struggle for money usually did not extend further than finding a convenient time to stop by an Atm or call home, it’s the thought that counts. Which is true, the kids really wanted to have a good time with their parents and mingle worlds. The thought counts when the tools for showing love are materialistic.
The parents favored Jerry’s room because, well, it had character, and books. More books than most these parents had ever seen in a young man’s household. The father’s never dreamed of reading for readings sake going through business school. If it wasn’t huge Economics and Market Research textbooks it was Wall Street they were reading in their allotted time. And the mother’s chided Jerry’s friends for having DVD on their shelves instead of books, a better waste of money they must have meant. So when they saw this spark of curiosity in a youth it excited them. Gave them hope someone was going to take another route and live the life they can only see now, on top of their successful carriers, as something worth doing. Something they might even do themselves if they had the chance to do it over, but that’s just wishful thinking.
The unfinished wooden bookcase bought on sale at Lowe’s has turned into more of a central hunker zone for Jerry’s growing interests than a formidable bookcase. The shelves, long ago full, are now more like terraces overlooking the vertical stack he’s begun to arrange on the floor in front of his blue light special purchase. Resting on top of the waist tall piece of furniture sits a porcelain bowl rimmed with miniature tree frog figurines that houses an abundantly healthy Lucky Bamboo stalk, next to his dancing brass Shiva statue holding the sands of existence and keeping pace with the unfolding of time. Perhaps even unfolding time himself Jerry often imagined for the sake of imagining. Next to that is the pile of ash from his simple wood incense burner far too small to contain all the Nag Champa he burned, next to his favorite red candle and that’s all the room he managed to squeeze aside the books.
What made Jerry smile was for all the compliments he got just for trying to find something more substantial in life than numbers, most of the parents didn’t actually look at the books, or even the titles. Because if they did, Jerry was sure some books might be about things they had something to say about. For instance, The Road to Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, Peyote Religions, Doors of Perception, Idiots Guide to Astrology, Introduction to Kama Sutra, not to mention how many books about different ways of looking at God he had. In Jerry’s eyes every book ever written had something to say about God but he knew most people didn’t share that view. Jerry thought that was going to incite the Christian crew more than anything, he was almost hoping for a little more educated dialectics from the parents, but nobody challenged him. Sufism? he imagined them asking with puzzled, sour looking expressions on their faces. The Holographic Universe? Hinduism? Alas, he was safe from their probes on account that none of them took time to look at the books themselves, just that there were books and the boy sounded honest. Maybe you can judge a book by its cover these days Jerry worried.
Jerry loved books because he knew knowledge is power, and the only real way humans seem to have found to try an honestly encapsulate truth is through books. The only real way people have ever been encapsulated is with books too, one in particular recently. Well, the last two thousands years or so, and Jerry wanted to know what made some books better than other books. What made some books so true in people’s eyes they were willing to go to war over them, entire countries would wage death tours in the name of a book. Who could write such a book? And how the hell did they market it so well?

On a Tuesday Jerry’s shower finally clogged to a complete halt. It had been draining slowly ever since he moved in, and four bottles of store-bought Drano hadn’t solved the problem so he was forced to call a Plummer. To his delight it was on a day when they weren’t so busy they could make it out the same day. He learned through the course of the visit that Jason, the plumber, was a twenty something Caucasian male who lived a little further rout from the center of the city. He spoke with a genuine southern drawl and came across as a standup Good ‘Ole Boy in the words of Waylon Jennings. Not really thinking about the patterned response people seemed to have upon entering his room for the first time, Jerry was puzzled for a moment when Jason, the plumber, asked him what religion he was. This wasn’t a normal meet and greet question was the first thing to go through his head, but then he quickly remembered the autographed picture of the Dali Lama hanging on his wall and launched into his ramble. He calls it a ramble because he gets this question all the time from people expecting a one or two word answer. He laughs because he’s aiming his whole life at studying and living just to find a conceptual idea to explain what religion he is to himself, or if the word religion is a good word to use at all. So when he’s put on the spot he likes to riff and see what comes up, spinning things off people and seeing how they react. He talks to learn more than to tell anybody what he thinks he knows, but you’d be surprised how willing people are to believe people who talk with a bit of passion and confidence and articulate sentences.
“Well I’m just looking for the truth, and I think religion is a good site to dig in and around, but I like to think religion is an art, that you craft. Does that make sense?”
No not really but Jason noticed the book shelf/corner and asked if Jerry had a Bible. Great he thought, another evangelist to quote dogma to him. Ever humble, Jerry said of course and looked through the bookshelf to see what he could come up with while Jason went at it with the tub. Buckets, draining pumps, other foreign metal objects with spring looking things on it Jerry had never seen all seemed to come into use getting the clog undone. Half mindedly Jerry imagined his own tool box was his bookshelf, and the clogged drain was something he still needed to find but knew was there because he’d seen glimpses of it on occasion. Coming back to the task at hand Jerry found a book titled The OTHER Bible: Alternative Ancients Scriptures with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and lots of books about Christianity, Nietzsche would even fall under that category, but the Bible? He’d have to look.
Sure enough when he saw his Bible he stepped on his own foot for not remembering Uncle Tom had given him and his brother both a copy at their father’s funeral. It was in its own box and everything, inscribed with a heartfelt inscription strongly suggesting he read the Bible before deciding what to believe. It’s not that Jerry was bitter about the Bible or Christianity or even evangelists, it’s just that his life had led him to ask questions that seemed to go deeper than the static, edited, political version of the book that existed today. Jerry had all the faith in the world Jesus really existed, and really had powers beyond metaphysical explanation, and more love than most humans can bear to even glimpse, but whether what the Bible said he said was what Jesus really said, and whether Jesus was really the only one to ever perform miracles or not, the vote was still out. Jerry just needed more to go on than a single perspective. Context is the lens of truth he knew, and wasn’t going to let his desire to know pollute his faith to believe something he know he doesn’t have enough to build a solid base on.
Confirming to Jason he did indeed have a bible and waiting for the sermon with a smile, Jerry was genuinely surprised and even excited when instead Jason started talking about how he wasn’t sure the Bible said what it was meant to say. As he plumbed away he said, “IS that the King James Version?” It wasn’t it was the Oxford edition. “Look and see if Matthew 23:13 is in there because in most Bibles, except for the King James, they tend to leave it out.”
Now this was something Jerry got excited about. It’s not every day a plumber comes and points out how a fallacy in the Bible. There was a lot to read into here. I mean, a plumber? Sure enough, turning to Matthew the Bible skipped right past whatever it said in 23:14. It went straight from 23:13 to 23:15 in the middle of a lecture condemning the Pharisee’s for being hypocritical. Ah the irony! Jerry loved this! But what did it say in 23:14? He scrambled through his roommates rooms in hoes of finding another Bible but to no avail, he would have to wait and see what it said at his friends house.
What mattered to Jerry though was not the single sentence snippet of Dogma left out for whatever self protecting reasons the church or the publisher or whoever deiced to leave it out said. What Jerry wanted to know was who had the autority to edit the Bible? How does one build up that kind of credib9ilty to have enough Holier than though in them to deicide what God’s truth was? The Nicene Council was bad enough over a thousand years ago, who was still snipping away?

On Sunday Jerry and his roommates entertained and he found himself talking with a girl he’d met before only in passing and seen her face around campus, but never really introduced or conversed with. Melanie. Taking a sample shelf Melanie followed along left to right reading the vertical titles: Hafiz’s The Gift, The Complete Idiots Guide to Teaching the Bible, Awakening the Kundalini, Leaves of Grass, The Discovery Channel’s Evolution Series in book form, The Brother’s Karamazov. She wondered how anybody could wind up so confused. A somewhat more traditional girl she was raised in the suburbs of middle America with a set of Sitcom parents, father working, mother the house manager, church on the holidays and only until she was old enough to realize they couldn’t make her go on those days either. Somewhere inside her she wondered if she stopped going more out of rebellion than the calling of her own heart, but those thoughts never come to surface until she hears a story about something bad happening to a friend. One would think all the terrors on the news would be enough to bring up those sorts of doubts, but like her dreams she’s become desensitized to such stirrers.
Turning towards the sound of beads falling back into place she is met by Jerry with a cup of tea in a small, olive green crackle cup. “They say tea does wonders for the body. Oxidizes and cleanses, but I drink it for the ritual. Helps me to see the whole world in my hands. Not to mention my Starbucks scholarship is running on empty and the coffee buzz has lost it’s edge these days.” He says with his signature smile.
It’s her first time over here. Well, first time sober anyways. There were pre-parties and post-parties over here earlier in the year, but everyone drinks before, after and during those. The result of course being a reduction in the conversations people tend to have to chit chat, time filler everyone projects to be who they think the person they’re talking to wants them to be. Come to think of it she talks like that during most of the day to, especially when she runs into “Sisters” between classes. But now things are a bit more personal between them, he officially invited her for their ritual Sexy Sunday celebration. The image of her real first night here when the police managed to stay away until everyone left sometime around four in the morning, when she found herself smoking a cigarette out back with her best friend Sharon and she was watching him laugh his ass of at something she couldn’t figure out. Jerry, who for some reason had been walking around with a microphone from Star Search all night was interviewing a girl she knew but who wasn’t her “sister.” He was asking whether or not she dreamt in color Melanie remembers. Casually eavesdropping as people learn to do here she remembers asking herself, who talks about the metaphysics of dreaming when their ten shots of Patron deep and two hours from sunrise? Her own mental haze never allowed the questions, any of them, to take much flight though before she felt the heat of her cigarette getting dangerously close to her index finger. How on earth did she remember that moment? And why now?
Sipping her Green Tea as Jerry flipped through the pile of burned CD’s stacked atop his stereo, Melanie takes the comfortable moment of silence to look around his room. Purple orchids in an empty Greygoose bottle, 4 by 6 pictures of mostly picture laughing hysterically tacked to the wooden walls in every direction she looked, a strange looking round piece of wood with what appears to be half a tennis ball underneath it on the floor next to his queen bed with its inviting gentle blue comforter, a lit candle in all four corners of the room, a funny looking bean pillow bellow a beige tapestry with some sort of eastern Buddha image on it she’s seen somewhere before but never understood. A pair of bongos lay next to the balance board and an auspicious looking hookah she took as explanation for the framed Phish poster on the wall which looked more like museum art than something one would buy in the parking lot after a show. It seemed every direction she found herself gazing in had something to look into, be it a picture worth taking a closer examination of from some late night turned silly, or his wall hanging titled “The Three Realms of Existence” with its itty bitty print describing each layer for the interested ones with real curiosity. Finishing her tea Melanie sits down under the brightly colored Tibetan Prayer flags on a light gray leather seat and can’t help but ask, “are you Buddhist?”
Finding the CD he was looking for just as she spoke Jerry turned with a smile, “Well I’m very curious, and I think the divine mystery is far to big to fit into any one religion. So am I Buddhist? In a practical sense maybe, but I don’t think I’d ever make a claim like that until I’ve studied everything about everything, which thank God will be never given how many stars I see on clear nights.”
Not sure if that was an answer Melanie is glad when Jerry notices her empty cup.
“More tea?”
“Sure why not.” she says with an unprepared, genuine smile.
For one reason or another Melanie bumped into Jerry and his roommates that Sunday afternoon at the mall shopping for a formal dress. Jerry and his two goofball roommates didn’t have any explanation for being in the mall other than “It’s sexy Sunday,” which is also how they explained being dressed in suits at two o’clock in the afternoon with a bag from the Discovery Store. Constellation projectors were on sale they said with an extreme joy Melanie hadn’t tapped into yet.

Just then, a fluttering of wings alerts Melanie to turn around just in time to see the famous mocking bird flying right for her! J.Crew-Bose Store-Orange Julius- almost there- and with a whoosh the winged messenger pulled up and flew by over head, dropping a package to Melanie as it did. Excited, Melanie open the box to find a box with in another box, inside another box and then there was one more box inside that one but that box had a red ribbon tied in a bow on it. Opening that final box Melanie found an envelope, and inside that a letter that seemed to shimmer as she unfolded it. She had heard of such messenger birds as these. They delivered telepathic messages in physical format, like a psychic antenna to video converter thing one might buy at the Radio shack over there next to J. Crew in a few years when the technology catches up. To our mental capacity. But what was the message? And was the message for her, or for the observers just off the page, sitting around a big wooden oval table with an old fashioned green chalk board they never really use, but always enjoy the prior class’ comments. It might even be a nice sunny day after a nice weekend home with the family, stuffing yourself because you give thanks and if the school is going to give you a day off then you’re sure as hell going to take advantage of it. Maybe the message on the shimmering piece of paper the Famous Mockingbird dropped off is for those people looking out the two big windows with square glass panels to observe the big grassy courtyard just outside the Hall you’re in. Maybe you can even see people hanging out outside talking on their cell phones and smoking cigarettes…
Melanie, fed up with playing around in her own mind for so long, finally read the message and it said… “I just want to apologize for not making it to class today, but I really had some signs tell me There’s this adventure I needed to prepare for and take and it’s only happening, ever in the history of time, today, December second. I want to thank everyone for a great class all semester. This definitely goes down in my best class ever book. WE should get together sometime and sit around and read stories, I’ll host no problem. I live right over on Fondren we can rock all night long. Maybe we can get Mr. Haynes to come as an official established author and then write an article about it for the newspaper and get a name for our club and voila, we’ve got a club started. Anyways, email me and we’ll figure it out. Also I would really love feedback on this story, it’s a bit of the top of my head but if you have thoughts, email is key. All is much appreciated. colesuttle@hotmail.com.”
With that the shiny piece of paper slipped out of Melanie’s hand and turned into a puddle on contact with the linoleum floor. The Mall was quite now except for the distant hoot of the Famous Mocking bird, delivering those special messages for people with open hearts.

So far this story could go in a multitude of ways. What I’m trying to do is illustrate different views of books, which is a metaphor for angles of truth. Is truth relative? Objective? It’s about the power of books and persuasion, gullibility, unintended wisdom. What do you see it driving at? Where can scenes be put in? I was more focused on building characters than the scenes in this round. I know it’s a bit ambitious, but ambition leads to leaks which turn into floodgates if you poke them enough.